Holding fewer meetings

People at my work know that I am not a fan of meetings. I put together a presentation about communication principles and how we could have fewer meetings and be more productive.

Essentially, less of this:

And more of this:

We need to move away from group gatherings that often waste many people’s time, and embrace individual conversations and relationships.

I loved this article from Cal Newport: Combating zoom overload with reverse meetings. Here is the basic premise:

• Everyone maintains regular office hours: set times each week during which they’re always available via video conference, chat, and phone. During these times you can digitally stop by and chat without a prior appointment. (For more on office hours, see this excerpt from A World Without Email on the topic.)
• If you have a topic you want to discuss with a group of your colleagues, instead of gathering them all together in a new meeting, you instead visit each of their office hours one-by-one to talk it through.
• In many cases, these one-on-one conversations should be sufficient for you to reach a resolution on the issue, or at the very least, reduce it down to a very targeted set of questions that can be much more efficiently addressed.