The meeting we stopped having

For three years, Quill had a status meeting every Monday at 11:00 AM Eastern. Twenty-two people, forty-five minutes, one shared doc. Each team took a turn saying what they shipped last week and what they planned this week. It was the kind of meeting nobody hated and nobody would have missed.

In April of last year we added up what it cost. Twenty-two people times forty-five minutes is 16.5 hours a week, or about 850 hours a year. For the West Coast it started at 8:00 AM, which meant people blocked their mornings around it. And when we asked everyone what they had learned in the last four meetings, the honest answer for most was: nothing they could not have read in two minutes.

So we stopped having it. Here is what we did instead.

A page, not a meeting

The meeting became a page: “Week of” plus the date, made from a template every Friday afternoon. Each team owns one section. By Monday at noon in their own time zone, the owner writes three things:

1. What shipped, with links.
2. What is next, in one or two lines.
3. What they need from another team, if anything.

That third line is the important one. Anything written there becomes a discussion on the page of the team being asked, with a close date of Wednesday. The ask cannot be waved through in a meeting; it has to be answered in writing, and the answer lands in the log.

What we expected to lose

We worried about three things: that people would stop reading, that teams would lose track of each other, and that the company would feel quieter.

The first worry was wrong. The weekly page gets read by 94% of the company by Tuesday, according to Quill’s own page views, compared with an attendance of about 80% at the meeting. People read it on their own schedule, many of them on a phone over coffee.

The second was mostly wrong. Cross-team asks went up, not down, from about four a week to nine, because writing an ask was easier than raising it in front of twenty people. Most of them closed by Wednesday.

The thing we brought back

The third worry was right. The company did feel quieter. The status meeting had been doing a second, unspoken job: it was the one time a week everyone saw each other’s faces.

So we brought back a meeting, but not that one. Every other Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern (11:00 AM in Portland, 8:00 AM in Honolulu for our one colleague there, who chose it) we hold a thirty-minute demo. No status, no updates, no slides. One or two people show something they built or learned. Attendance is optional and runs at about 85%.

We did not cancel a meeting. We split it into the part that needed to be written and the part that needed to be together.

If you want to try it

• Start with one month, and say so. A trial is easier to agree to than a cancellation.
• Make the page from a template, so the structure is the same every week and reading it takes two minutes.
• Give every ask a close date. An ask without one is a wish.
• Keep one meeting that is only for seeing each other, and make it optional.

Fourteen months in, nobody has proposed bringing the status meeting back. The 850 hours went to work, and to the Thursday demo, which is the best half hour of our week.