How to Reduce Meetings 🪚
How to Reduce Meetings 🪚
Strategies and practical ideas for better async communication, and a detailed case study.
Hey 👋 this is Luca! Welcome to a 🔒 weekly edition 🔒 of Refactoring.
Every week I write advice on how to become a better engineering leader, backed by my own experience, research and case studies.
Here are the latest articles you may have missed:
To receive all the full articles and support Refactoring, consider subscribing:
You can also learn more about the benefits of a paid plan.
I spend 10-20% of my time doing some consulting to teams who want to work better together.
I do this to stay grounded to reality, and not to turn eventually into one of those ivory tower writers who talk about things they don’t really know anymore.
In these chats, the absolute #1 complaint I hear is: “we do too many meetings”.
These thoughts are popular even outside the — admittedly small — sample I can observe. A few years ago, Pluralsight ran a wide survey where engineers ranked the biggest offenders to their productivity.
Meetings got the silver medal 🥈 right behind waiting for other people to do stuff. But while waiting for people is a necessary evil sometimes, boy do bad meetings feel like a waste of time!
I have already written about this in the past 👇 and that article prompted many conversations with teams and tech leaders.
Fast forward two years, I think we can go deeper — by adding more ideas and making real-world, practical examples of meetings that have been successfully removed, and how.
So this is what we will cover today:
🙅♂️ Meetings culture — why meetings are so divisive today.
🔥 Meetings extremes — why extreme examples you find online are just wishful thinking.
⚖️ Status vs Action — the goals of a meeting and those of its attendees. You can’t cut anything until you don’t understand those.
🪚 Unbundling meetings — how to make a meeting smaller or remove it altogether, in practice.
🔍 Case Study — we take a real-world, bi-weekly, 2 hours review + planning, and make it gradually… disappear!
Let’s dive in!