Don’t cancel meetings to be productive, cancel one-on-ones

Time is our most precious asset, and we’re always running out of it. Having spent the past seven years running a company all about productivity, I’ve found that meetings are generally the most inefficient activity across companies. So I started to cancel meetings.

That is until I found the meetings that truly needed to be added back. I learned through this trial-and-error process of canceled meetings that the most inefficient and unproductive are one-on-ones, especially among executives.

One-on-ones for individual contributors are necessary for morale, connection, and coaching. But for executives, they are costly, ineffective, and inefficient. I used to have standing one-on-ones with every member of the executive team, and they had one-on-ones with each other. Think about the cost of these meetings: the highest paid people meeting with each other individually, every week. But more importantly, what comes out of these meetings? And what happens when you cancel meetings?

I found it was the single source of enabling politically charged decision-making. Many executives use one-on-ones to privately align on their preferred decision or outcome for an upcoming topic. While they don’t necessarily have bad intent, it creates a culture of closed-door decisions made without transparency. Plus, the discrete and informal nature of one-on-ones created a slippery slope to complaining about others.

Topics discussed in a one-on-one are rarely only relevant to the two people in the room. The vast majority of times that executives disagree vehemently and can’t come to a quick resolution is simply because both parties don’t have the full context.

The solution? I canceled meetings within the executive team and replaced them with daily group meetings.

Companies have become far too siloed, and fragmented meetings are largely what causes it. The way to solve it is by canceling one-on-one meetings at the top.

Default to asynchronous work

The large majority of work can be done in asynchronous communication. With all the productivity tools at our disposal, between project management platforms, email, and messaging, live conversations are the least efficient way to work.

Not only is asynchronous work typically faster, it creates a repository of decisions and discussions that can be referenced by everyone. Our entire executive team can catch up on progress and decisions when it suits their schedule, creating more transparency without extra work.

When a topic can’t be concluded quickly asynchronously, we add that topic to the daily executive team meeting.

Schedule daily meetings with the full executive team

We use a daily, full-team meeting to make decisions, with shared context already available and discussed async. Everyone is in the room, everyone has the same knowledge, and everyone leaves on the same page. Rather than repeating one conversation over and over amongst individuals, we discuss it once together live.

It might sound counterintuitive to schedule a daily executive team meeting to save time, but between all of our calendars, we easily had 20 one-on-ones weekly. We canceled meetings until we got down to five meetings per week with just as much accomplished.

Add ‘one-off’ meetings for longer discussions

At first, the daily meetings had pushback. I heard that it would be inefficient for the whole team to meet when not every topic is related to everyone.

The reality is that most of the time, it’s beneficial to share the context even when it doesn’t directly affect others. In rare cases where it truly is a project or decision that needs dedicated one-on-one time, we use a one-off.

These one-off meetings are with specific stakeholders, must be about a particular topic, and the meeting results should be captured in the daily full-team meetings.

Of course, these aren’t allowed to be recurring meetings.

Create a culture of consciousness around time

I can control my schedule, but to create change at the company level you have to have a culture that values and protects time.

I was open with the executive team about why I banned one-on-ones and encouraged them to use discretion if they needed to make an exception. I openly advocate for the entire company, at all levels, to be mindful of all meetings.

Our policy is to respectfully give feedback if a meeting is a waste of time. It helps the meeting host learn, run a more effective meeting the next time around, and think through if a meeting is truly necessary.

Ultimately, time is our only truly limited resource. Replacing one-on-ones with daily team meetings and one-offs has multiplied our company decision-making, productivity, and happiness working with each other.