Never-Take-A-Meeting [A Life Experiment]

(or…. How I Learned That Diamond Class Was For Losers)

By the time you get to this point in the article, a lot of folks will already be worrying about the time they're already spending on it and how they're distracting themselves from their work.

And it's just the opening line!

Many people today feel that they don’t have enough time to get their work things done. While running from one client meeting to another, they seem to never find an end to their work and these executives have to summon additional time in their evenings and weekends to catch up.

These are busy people with responsibilities. Their companies knows they can deliver and trust them to travel the globe to make the business happen. They are people like you and me.

But what if we’re going a critical part of the way we work all wrong?

What if our appetite for our desire to do business in person was actually negatively impacting our productivity, increasing our stress and worse still, degrading our mental and physical health? What if we have trapped ourselves in loyalty schemes where the benefit to the corporations outweighs the benefits to their frequent customers?

An increasing number of young (and less young) professionals that I talk to are anxious, distracted from their friends and family, and they even feel unsatisfied by their contributions (despite the high volume of hours worked).

I wanted to write this piece to share a little experiment that I set myself this year. I don't know if I'd call it (yet) a serious recommendation on how you should act at work - but I do hope it might cause a moment of reflection by the busy people out there.

I’ve spent the last 15 years running a pretty intense business and through that time I’ve worked with amazing companies across the globe and met a plethora of inspiring people in so many different sectors. Maybe I’ve had the pleasure to meet some of your reading this. The experience of running PSFK (and now Wallkit) has been rich and rewarding but this year I begun to wonder if the way I go about my business is actually making me less money than I could be earning and making both work and life less fulfilling than it could be.

I am testing a theory around the idea that the more time I spend in business travel and external meetings, the greater detriment to my business and, in fact to my life. I’m not saying that meetings with people in-person meeting isn’t important, I just wonder if the times we need to shake hands needs to be dramatically less than the times we currently press flesh today.

I’ve spoken to some of you about this approach and often those of you who find themselves forever away from home have asked me to share some of my thoughts and learnings. So in this note, I’m providing some overview of this project, some recommendations and suggestions which you could try. I don’t think I have the right answer for everybody, but I hope by putting this out there will create discussion so that I can gather other people’s points of view and built this into a more robust theory.

My Practical & Personal Approach for 208

During the whole of 2018, I have put myself on a diet of zero-travel and no-meetings and instead turned time and time again to a technology that is as useful as it was the day it was invented over 150 years ago: the telephone. 

2 Quick Rules if You’re Skimming This Article (because you think you're too busy):

A: Always default to a telephone call. It’s fast and efficient. Most people in business understand the protocol and the lack of physical presence prohibits any off topic conversation for too long.

B: Only meet someone outside of your company in person if you need to close the deal, if they need to see in your eyes that they can trust you. Otherwise, follow Rule A.

Approaches I Am Pursuing In 2018

1: Zero Travel

Don’t travel for work

Travel is a time suck and we mistake the few face-to-face meetings we have as 'time well spent'. For the hours or days spent flying or driving or train-ing to see a handful of clients and partners, you could have called them and a dozen more.

There are a number of reasons why I think we should avoid travel:

For a start, and a reason I think most of us could all agree with, is that the amount of “work” we typically get done decreases when we travel. Despite all the connectivity, the ability to stay in touch and stay on top is pretty low. Sure, you can squeeze a few emails on your phone in the back of your rideshare or you can wait for the wifi to go in and out on the plane but travel tends to mean a lot of wasted time. We often use the face to face meetings to justify our travel - but no matter how important we think a meeting was to travel for, back home the workload just backs up waiting for us. 

Secondly, we are programmed to explore. As curious creatures, we love travel and the travel and hospitality sector game our experience so we get hooked on it. As a Delta Diamond, I ask myself what was I doing with all that time on the road. I seriously believe that we need to start thinking that frequent flyer points are for the losers. The more you have, the less productive you are. I’m beginning to think that mileage programs are for the folks who don’t know how to get the most out of their time or are to scared to challenge their employers out-dated notion of productivity. 

Business executives also see travel as a way of doing things that they can’t do at home - maybe it’s as simple as getting up and going to the gym, or maybe it’s to have drinks and dinner without a guilt to return home to friends and family. Maybe, it's our macrol-level inability to focus our time at work has made us time poor at home and the the steak on the road isn't a reward but a manifestation of our poor decision making.

2: No (External) Meetings

Never meet for business

The next time you’re signing in at a building’s security desk, take a moment to remind yourself about the reasons you are at someone else’s offices and whether you need to be there. Signing in used to be part of the grind for me but this year the act of it reminds me that I’m breaking a rule: never meet for business.

PSFK and Wallkit's office is in the New York neighborhood of Noho, just north of Soho. If I go to a meeting anywhere outside of my vicinity, it takes me 30 minutes to get there and then the meeting take an hour and the trip back is another 30 minutes (if I didn’t stop to get a sandwich for lunch.)

A telephone call takes 20 minutes and my hunch is that 95% of every work-related item that gets discussed and agreed upon in a 1 hour face-to-face meeting can be discussed and agreed upon in a a short call. 

Why the mismatch in time? Face to face meetings are be peppered with small talk and social discussions that will last longer that you need. On a conference call, there’s only so long you can ask about kids and vacation. In a meeting, these topics can last forever.

People also take advantage of your time when you’re sat in reception. Knowing that you’ve arrived, they leave you sat there, or they let their last meeting overrun, or they check emails before the 'meeting starts'. But.., everyone knows that they have to be on a telephone meeting on-time. Sure, some people aren’t always on time - but that’s why you have to book 20 minute calls so the onus is on them to show up.

On reflection, I think that one disadvantage to the telephone-call approach is that there’s always the chance of missing a serendipitous conversation on the way back to the elevator bank that will lead to new business from other colleagues. That's the missing 5%. But this could that be compensated by having more time to do great work and live life well because you have the time.

3: Avoid Meeting For Coffee

Don’t take time out

Do not take informal meetings with external people during work hours. As social creatures, we love to network: we sit and exchange words across drinks, but these meetings can be a time suck and, at worst, the discussion is unlikely to assist you deliver agains your immediate to-dos.

Often, the coffee meeting is a conversation that’s not directly connected with our work. Often we attend them for social reasons too.

If you’re struggling with your overall use of time, coffee meetings might be a big problem for you. I think it’s ok to meet people socially for breakfast or lunch but don’t confuse a social lunch with a business coffee. 

Coffee meetings are a problem. Sometimes someone you like and trust introduces you to a person via email and suggests that it would be good that you both have a coffee. Your trusted peer has no idea about your business needs, your current focus (They are actually, trying to do the contact a favor more than you) but, out of courtesy, we respond by suggesting a get together.

Instead, you must respond to your new contact by always suggesting a call.

Courtesy also gets in the way at the face-to-face coffee meeting: what happens if you do meet in person and you (either/both) realize within 10 minutes that you can’t assist each other, work-wise or socially? Most often, you still sit there for at least another 20 minutes out of politeness, when you could be back at work (or home) doing something for productive or fun!

4: Clarification: Go To Meetings. With Colleagues. A lot

The office is a catalyst of ideas that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

Internal meetings have a bad rap. There’s a lot of recent discussion that people’s time is being wasted, that the meetings go on too long because that they are badly managed. 

And, sure, that can be true some of the time. But it can’t be true all of the time. While people in meetings wish they would end so they could go and work maybe they should realize that meetings are the work.

I'm guessing that the office was a concept that was constructed by some wiley rascal to trap us together and force us to collaborate for the time period we’re being paid for. I also assume that the office is an evolution of the factory and an unnatural idea bestowed upon us: we sit within walls blinkered in ways so we focus on the task required. But the amazing thing that happens in an office rather than a factory, is that we use our minds instead of our hands.

And when people meet - for a minute in the kitchen, for 5 minutes at the social-tables or 30 minutes in the conference room, our minds exchange ideas in a way that they could never do if we were all remote. We build off of each other faster than data gets send through fiber wires. As an owner, or manager, it is a marvel to watch the human ability to share, interpret and develop. 

And sure, you’re probably thinking, Didn’t he just say to not meet? Yes and no. What I suspect is that meetings with staff means business gets to the place it needs to go faster but I sense that meetings with clients, vendors and partners slow things down. When we meet external people, we aren’t creating within the meeting: we are persuading, or listening: with “strangers”. We rarely roll our sleeves up and get our hands dirty together. With colleagues, we can make things better together.

5. Don't Take Your Laptop Home

Your phone is good enough

And if it's not. Maybe you need to hire someone, not work overtime for free. OK, ok. This section I need to work on. Especially as I don't currently practice it: right now, I take the laptop home, don't open it and then bring it back to work.

6. Avoid More Of The Same

Of course, this approach should allow you to get your work done but we must be not fall in the trap of filling the extra time with more of the same work processes. This is super important to remember.

If you double your available time to make or sell, it might not double your production or sales. At some point, the productivity plateaus. Refusing meetings and taking calls can take you so far but there are other mechanics you need to consider to achieve games. Use the time gained through my recommendations to consider and apply those mechanics.

Here are some suggestions:

A. Turn To-Do Lists Into Calendar Schedules

When you have no time, your Monday’s (and most mornings) are full with writing to-do lists. You come back from the weekend on Monday (or worse still, it's Sunday night) and you grasp at notes, emails and memories to try to work out what your plan of action is. Often we write these lists looking back on our last week and not on our next.

Maybe you feel compelled to have this to-do list just to feel a sense of control, maybe you need a to-do list so you can physically cross through it and feel accomplished. But by being on top of a to-do list, does it mean you do what you need to do? Does it mean you do what you can do? Or should do?

Often these time-management tools are built around the tasks and the needs and the demands and the requests that we have to respond to. But are they the work we need to do?

With more time, we can take a step back and see that some of the things we do are repeated. Maybe we repeat them every day. Maybe we repeat them every week. By freeing oneself up, one can see the tasks that get repeated. We can mark our calendars (and even mark out time in our calendar) to do these tasks each day, or week, or month and in some ways by doing so we remove the task from your scrambled to-do list and just make it something you do every other Wednesday. 

B. Get Rounded

Could you use the additional time to be a better worker, friend, family member and human?

When you do find that you have more time, instead of spending the middle of the day working out who to spam to try to get new business, maybe you just get lunch. Maybe you get that lunch with a colleague who you’re working with and you talk about all sorts of things but there’s something in what gets said that helps you get a little more ahead with what you’re doing. Maybe they help you think about how you can achieve your goals without annoying 10,000 people with your email missive?

But instead of lunch - what if you took a class and you learned Spanish how you always wanted, or the piano. There has never been a better time to find and hire talented professionals to teach you for lessons. You can find them on the internet and hire them by the hour around your schedule.

Or better still, how about you become the teacher? Maybe you teach that special skill no-one else at work knows about - knitting or karate? Or you become the curator and everyone teaches each other?

Or maybe you just spend lunch deep diving those music newsletters and you discover you kind of appreciate jazz in a way you never realized before.

A lot of research talks about how lateral inspiration helps us at work. The time exercising allows our brain to reset, the moments we spend at the potter wheel allow our minds to make connections that if wouldn’t do consciously.

And this is not just about us. This helps us be with others: We need to fill our lives with moments of richness not just for our own experience but to build the depth that we offer others.

C. Channel Boredom

Of course, when you seem to get more time on your hands, you also get bored. You might be able to take a step back and see the bigger picture. You might be able to find new experiences to make you and life richer. But with more productivity, you might also see can drift into a mindset where you see the old world as a little boring. You might even ask, is this it? You might say, I’ve invested all this time in my careers or running a business and.Is.This.It?

Don’t freak out. Spend time noting, drawing, painting, photographing, adding pictures or instagram, taking pictures off instagram.

So to Wrap Up

Maybe this is the rule: never shake a hand for work

(You never really shake with people at work and/or the people you love you hug)

******

Over the next few weeks I’m going to look at comments and do more reading about this. I'll fix typos too. If I do get some reaction, I’ll work on this piece more: I know some books which I’ll deep dive and I already have some stats and other supporting data in my pockets. If no one notices, then I’ve channeled my boredom, I’ve shared and I’ll go back to work with the people of my daytimes.

Piers Fawkes is the Founder & President of PSFK, a business intelligence provider for the retail sector, and he is also Co-Founder & CEO of Wallkit, a software-as-service subscriptions and membership platform.

His 2017 flights on Delta

His 2018 flights on Delta so far (to Aug 20, 2018)

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