A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

particular, waiting until the next status meeting might be annoying if
you need a quick answer to a question or help overcoming an
obstacle. In the groups I’ve studied that use some variation of these
regular meetings, however, these bad events seem to be much rarer
than people fear. Fallback protocols, of course, can always be put in
place to mitigate such concerns (e.g., “If something urgent comes up
before the next status meeting, knock on my door”).
A bigger issue with this style of communication protocol is that
its effectiveness will rapidly diminish if you allow the status meetings
to become longer and less focused. As Hicks and Foster report about
their own experience:

---

In the Fall of 2007 the meetings were approaching 30
minutes as students talked more with their adviser, during
the meeting, about particular technical issues. While the
longer meetings produced more technical information, they
did not generate more group interest or contribution. To the
contrary, the longer meetings became boring and tedious,
and so we redisciplined ourselves to keep the meetings
short.
Many of the students they surveyed emphasized the importance
of the length of the meetings. This is an idea that’s well understood
in the Scrum community. Short, structured check-ins can be
empowering. As soon as you let these gatherings devolve into looser,
more standard-style meetings, they become a tedious burden.
This distinction is important. In academia, for example, it’s
common for groups of professors to work collaboratively on projects,
such as a co-authored research paper or a departmental committee.
A standard technique to help “move the project forward” is to
establish a regularly occurring meeting, usually held once a week for
an hour. The motivation here is to use appointments on your
calendar—a convention that most people respect—to spark
productivity. If you’re forced to meet every week about the project,
the thinking goes, then this should encourage you to get work done
on a regular basis. These meetings are not at all the same thing as
Scrum-style status meetings. The former is essentially an abdication
of responsibility—an admission that you’re not organized enough to
accomplish something independently, so you need meetings to force
you into feeling like progress is happening—while the latter
empowers you to get even more done on your own. Weekly meetings
are too infrequent and vague. They take up too much time and often
feature people trying to weasel out of commitments through
doublespeak and conversational diversion. Status meetings, by
contrast, are both frequent and structured in the questions they
demand of participants: What did you do, what are you going to do,
what’s in your way? These two shouldn’t be confused.
If you work in groups on common professional goals, and you
find that this work is generating too many distracting messages or
aimless meetings, a well-executed status meeting protocol might

---

make a significant difference in your productivity. As Hicks and
Foster discovered, it’s surprising how much overwhelming,
attention-fracturing, back-and-forth interaction can be compressed
into a frequent schedule of very short check-ins.

---

Chapter 7