#151 - Addition by Subtraction, Take 2

The Benefits of Fewer Meetings

Dec 11, 2022

Hi 👋 - Everyone loves a canceled meeting. A look at what happened when workflow automation company Zapier eliminated meetings for a week. As always, thanks for reading.

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Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? – Paul Graham, Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

One Thing We Can All Agree On

Americans don’t agree on much: the existence of climate change, election results, allowable books in middle schools, or the meaning of pickleball. Yet right, left, or center, everyone loves it when a meeting gets canceled.

With budgets in tech under pressure and 2023 planning in full swing, managers would be wise to consider Zapier’s Getting Stuff Done week.

Zapier’s Experiment

Zapier is a workflow automation tool with a knack for experimentation. Earlier this year, it tested canceling meetings for a week. The company’s hypothesis was that by shifting communication from live to asynchronous, employees would have more time for deep work1.

The results? The earth turned. The sun continued to rise. Employees kind of liked it. According to a company-wide survey2:

89% of respondents found that communication was just as effective.

80% wanted another meeting-free week.

80% met their goals.

56% canceled one to five hours of meetings, while 26% canceled five to ten hours, translating into 1,000-3,000 hours of found time. Zapier employees gained an additional half-day or more. This created space to do business stuff like to acquire customers, balance balance sheets, write code, or wrangle data. (Or non-business stuff like watching TikTok.)

The largest benefit likely comes from differentiating valuable meetings from filler. Some meetings hold water. Some – most? – are poppycock. Zapier’s experiment gave teams permission to figure out which was which. The status quo creates its own inertia, making this difficult under business-as-usual conditions. For example, it’s uncomfortable for a junior employee to decline an invite or tell their boss that the weekly touch-base needn't be weekly.

There are benefits to occasionally shaking up the status quo. For example, in February 2014, portions of the London Tube were shut down due to striking workers. This forced commuters to find new ways to work. Forced to try something new, about 5% found a better route and stuck with it when the strike ended. Zapier’s experiment is a low risk and completely reversible analog for the office.

A stat that wasn’t included in the survey, but that I’d love to see, is how many meetings were permanently deleted after the experiment. Even if 90% were resurrected, the test freed up 100 to 300 hours of work time per week. The benefits are twofold. First, it eliminates a low-value activity. Second, it makes room for higher-value activity. Twofer. Over the course of a year, shifting time from low-value to high-value could significantly increase output without raising costs. That should quicken any CFO’s pulse. As a kicker, employees getting stuff done and burdened by fewer meetings are likely to be happier than colleagues stuck in Conference Room A.

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

While a scourge everywhere, low-value meetings are particularly pernicious in tech. A unique characteristic of software is that it offers infinite leverage3. Build once, sell repeatedly.

Software is written by programmers. In addition to hefty salaries – and thus a high opportunity cost for poorly used time – engineers have a different working style versus business roles. As Paul Graham argues in his excellent essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, meetings cost programmers more.

Graham bifurcates the world into two camps: managers and makers. Managers segment their days into 30 or 60 minute chunks and frequently change what they’re doing: a 1x1 followed by a planning meeting followed by the weekly stand-up followed by the monthly sit-down. Task switching is common. So is grabbing coffee.

Makers are artists, engineers, programmers, and writers – people who need meaty chunks of time to do deep, creative work. In HBO’s Silicon Valley, Jared and Monica are managers, while Dinesh, Gilfoyle, and Richard are makers. It’s unclear what Erlich Bachman is. (Full disclosure: I fall into the manager’s camp and own a Patagonia fleece).

In contrast to managers, makers prefer to segment their time into blocks of half day increments or more4:

You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

Hemingway wouldn’t be Hemingway if he had to cram his writing into 15 minute chunks here and there in between check-ins and syncs. He’d just be another guy in marketing who drinks too much. Meetings can throw a maker's whole day off kilter. Because software engineers don’t come cheap, the opportunity cost of this is high5:

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it. For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

Businesses need both managers and makers. Coffee doesn't drink itself after all. The danger arises when the two worlds collide. The people who run businesses tend to operate on the manager's schedule. For them, task switching is a way of life. But what’s normal for a manager can sap a maker’s productivity. The best managers recognize this opportunity cost and show restraint about meeting with makers. Graham recommends that managers schedule meetings with makers at the end of the day, so as to provide ample time for interruption-free work.

Could This Be An Email? Andy Grove’s Approach to Meetings

For better or worse, meetings are necessary. The key is to use them as effectively as possible. A well run meeting is a high leverage activity. However, in many organizations, there’s a wide gap between what is and what could be.

In High Output Management, former Intel CEO Andy Grove provides a useful checklist for deciding when to call a meeting6:

The chairman must have a clear understanding of the meeting’s objective – what needs to happen and what decision has to be made. The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it. So before calling a meeting, ask yourself: What am I trying to accomplish? Then ask, is a meeting necessary? Or desirable? Or justifiable? Don’t call a meeting if all the answers aren’t yes.

Although Google Calendar makes scheduling a meeting effortless, meetings aren’t free. Time and resources are finite. Saying “yes” to one thing necessarily means saying “no” to something else. Given the significant opportunity costs, particularly when executives are involved, there should be a high bar for scheduling meetings:

An estimate of the dollar cost of a manager’s time, including overhead, is about $100 per hour7. So a meeting involving ten managers for two hours costs the company $2,000. Most expenditures of $2,000 have to be approved in advance by senior people – like buying a copying machine or making a transatlantic trip – yet a manager can call a meeting and commit $2,000 worth of managerial resources at a whim.

To Grove, the characteristics of a good meeting are an agenda, a leader, a clear objective (what is to be accomplished?), frank discussion and lively debate, a maximum of eight people (ideally fewer), and that attendees arrive on-time and prepared. My hunch is that for most people, comparing the checklist and characteristics of a good meeting above against their calendar will bolster the case for running Zapier’s experiment.

There’s a natural imperative to add, rather than to subtract. How many companies start their strategic planning process by saying, “what should we stop doing next year?” How many managers say, “please cut my budget?” In my experience, none. Yet there are gains to subtraction.

Productivity is a function of output and the cost of generating that output. In lean times, companies typically focus on cutting costs – layoffs, trimming marketing budgets, downsizing the holiday party, and, if you’re Facebook, getting rid of in-office dry cleaning. Getting more out of your existing cost base is another approach. Zapier’s experiment was a low cost way of testing this.

Grove also advocates for process simplification, which involves questioning why each step in a process is performed. Many exist because of tradition (“this is how it’s always been done”) or inertia, but aren’t necessary. At Intel, about 30% of steps over a wide range of administrative tasks were superfluous and could be eliminated8. That’s likely true of meetings too.

Regardless of your thoughts on pickleball, having one fewer meeting undoubtedly lifts your spirits. With profitability and ROI taking center stage in 2023, more companies should run Zapier’s experiment. Sorry, Zoom.