The tactics that resonate with me the most are asynchronous messaging, blocking out time for real work and asking yourself "can it wait"/"does this have to be a meeting"? 

 

In my first job our team suffered a lot from the too many meetings syndrome. We were a team of three working hybrid with an expected max 2 day in the office. Because we were constantly working with other teams located around the world, we naturally ended up with many meetings scattered throughout the day. We tried our best to reduce them by constantly asking ourselves if the meeting was necessary and trying to implement the Slack and Loom first approach. It helped reduce meeting time but I believe it does sometimes increase the time to resolution, so I agree that there are meetings that should stay as such (such as problem solving meetings). From a tech perspective, decision making can be done effectively via RFC documents async and it can be much more efficient to build a good document with visuals and even an introductory Loom video to reduce back and forth as well as give everyone a chance to review in their own time. This also works well for building artifacts for the company as well as records for backtracking decision making as well as serve as performance indicators for promotion docs.

At my current company there are definitely plenty of meetings which I can already identify as potential async candidates. The tactic I'm implementing the most here is blocking out deep and light focus time in my Google calendar and updating my Slack status to match it. My team is respectful and everybody respects each other's focus time so I find heads  ups are not really needed, but transparency is the norm via use of Slack status. But finding out how your own team works best is essential in such a case. I mostly use Google calendar blocking for my own time tracking and to make sure no one schedules in my focus time without having an auto decline on my side until they reach out to me personally. It's been a game changer for me to block out time especially in the morning. 

As a general rule of thumb I think just as the speaker says, it comes down to understanding what is and isn't necessary when it comes to meetings and defaulting to async for things that require (and where people would actually benefit more from) time to think and review. Companies employ so many tools to achieve that, from Slack workflows, Loom recordings, Zoom recordings, Google Docs (or other word processing software), simple slack messages, email and so on. If everybody gets on board with stopping and asking themselves whether that meeting is necessary, things will already improve significantly. 

Thanks for the class, it was really enjoyable!