Reduce Your Meetings (What You Can Learn from Basecamp)

- How can you reduce your meetings, build more flexibility in your day, and be more productive at the same time? The Workshop Wednesday community helps you to run high-energy and result-driven workshops so that you can take back control over your workweek. And in today's episode, I'm going to show you a workshop you can copy today, and this workshop will help you to start replacing your meetings.

So, let's go. (lively music) In the last video, I showed you, step-by-step, how you can use the Workshop Creation Playbook to create your own workshops, and we used an example of creating a workshop, about working remote. And today, we're going to Zoom in, sorry about that, we're going to Zoom in on the last steps of the Playbook, so we're going to create the workshop formats, and we're going to set up the slides so that we can run the workshop.

What I did was to start a new Google Slides presentation, this can also be a Keynote, PowerPoint, or whatever you prefer, of course, and I copied the workshop skeleton to the slides. So, I started with Check-in, then the Workshop Part One, a break, Part Two, and the Check-out, and this will be our outline which we're going to start from.

I always like to start with a Check-in and end the meeting with a Check-out. An easy way to come up with creative Check-ins is to make use of this Check-in Generator by Daresay. There's a link in the template, but I also put the link down below in the show notes. So, this question could be, "What are you excited or worried about related to today's work?

" We're setting the stage, and we want to make sure people are focused on the right topic. And for the Check-out, I always like to know what the people think of the progress we made during the workshop, and also how confident they are about the next steps, and an easy way to do that is to make use of this dartboard.

You can ask people to pick a smiley that represents their current mood, or it can also be their own smiley they choose, and then put that on the dartboard. So, if they are maybe a bit overloaded, but they are really confident about the experiment, then they put it like this, and this way you can easily get a feeling and get a grasp at the end of the meeting how happy people are with the result.

And in the top-right corner, you'll see a time box, five minutes for the exercise, so that's the maximum amount of time that you use for it, and I like to put that on every slide so it's a reminder for myself, but it's also helpful for the team so they are more aware of how much time we are going to use for this.

And talking about time boxes, it's always nice to have a timer visible, at least for yourself, but maybe even for the whole group. You can use bigtimer. net for it, I like that one. You can create your customer time boxes here, so you just copy the time box that you see in the slide, and then you press Start, and it starts counting.

What I like about this is that you can share your screen with the rest of the meeting so that you always have a visible timer in the meeting itself. Of course, you can also use your phone. Okay, and now it's time for the fun stuff. We're going to deep-dive into the workshop. Let's start with Part One, and we want to help the team "Identify what level of autonomy they are in.

" And I think it's sufficient if we show them the video, and that they have some time after the video to reflect and to see maybe what they can improve in their current way of working. And, of course, having a video like this can save you time within the actual workshop itself. So, we time-boxed 15 minutes for this part of the workshop, and if you have a team that comes in well prepared into the meeting, then you can send this video as a pre-watch, but if you think that not everyone will watch it, then calculate some time within the meeting so that you can all watch it at the same time.

And after you are sure that everyone has seen the video, then you want to go into small group discussions. You want to talk about the "Benefits of asynchronous communication," and you want to help the team make a list of opportunities where they see room for improvement. A really great way to help people to reflect on what they just saw, what they heard, and to give some breathing time to think about it and then discuss it with each other is the 1-2-4-All exercise.

This comes from the Liberating Structures, and I'll put a link to that below as well, but what it comes down to is that you have one minute for yourself, two minutes in twosomes, in pairs, four minutes in foursomes, and then, five minutes, we're going to discuss it with the whole group. So, if you have a team of eight people, then everyone starts by themselves, and then you have four teams of two, you have, then, two teams of four, and then you're going to discuss with all eight people at the same time.

And this is where you level the playing field more for your team, it's easier for people to contribute. It's a bit more difficult to hide. And now, within 15 minutes, you have a list of opportunities which you can use. For this specific workshop, we want to make a list of meetings that can be replaced, or maybe partially replaced, and we want to first start by identifying, what are the real-time meetings, and then see if we can move them to asynchronous meetings.

But asynchronous, it's a word that we don't use daily, so it can be a little bit fake, and luckily we have Basecamp to the rescue. They've published their complete Playbook, and one of the parts is their Guide to Internal Communication. And it consists of two parts, the rules of thumb, and the general philosophy, which lists 30 principles they apply, and a second part about communicating day-to-day, about the toolset they used, and some automatic process that they used, and we're going to use this Guide to make it more concrete, what asynchronous really means.

So, let's put a screenshot of the Guide into our workshop, and also link to it, and we're going to help the team in making more bite-sized chunks of the whole article. But if you sent the Guide as a pre-read into the agenda invite, then it can help a lot, because if somebody already read it before, it gives them more time to process what they read, and also more time to think about how they can apply it to their own work.

And for this specific workshop, I like to focus on principle number three, which is about internal communication via long-form writing, and how this can lead to a welcomed reduction of meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities. And the reason you want to minimize these real-time opportunities is because they interrupt your day or other people's days, and this is killing for your productivity.

So, now that we have set the stage in the workshop, we're going to ask the people in the workshop to make a list of routine meetings they think that can be replaced. We first give them the opportunity to reflect about it and to think one minute for themselves, and you want people to write things down.

So, it can be either in the Google Slides itself if you give everyone access, or it can be a different tool which you prefer, it can be Google Docs. If you are onsite, then you can use even real Post-its, remember how it was back in the day, but make sure that you prepare and that you have something ready, where people will write things down.

And when the time is up, so the first minute is done, you invite the team to make pairs and to discuss the thing they have listed down, and see maybe where there's overlap. Maybe they get new ideas when talking to each other, ask them to write that down as well so that you are creating a collective memory for the group.

And what I like to do here is, before starting the two minutes, I like to introduce another concept from the Basecamp Guide, and this is this one, "You can not not communicate," and this way, we give them the Guide in more bite-sized chunks instead of overloading them with all of the information, and they can use this as well in the discussion they have with each other.

And I'm going to do the same for before the foursomes. So, "Speaking only helps who's in the room. " It can be something, it can be a prompt before going into the four minutes you have when you're going to talk in foursomes. And then, in the last step, "All", you have five minutes where you're going to discuss everything which just happened in small subgroups, and you're going to discuss them with everyone, with all the people in the room.

And you want to see patterns, and you want, best of all would be if the group themselves comes with the insights where they see opportunities and room for improvement. And then it's time for a break. By taking a break, you give your team and yourself the opportunity to reflect on what you just talked about and to recharge, which is an easy shortcut for better productivity.

So, make sure that every 60 to 90 minutes, you build in a break of 10 to 15 minutes, and then go for a stretch, maybe a walk, grab a bite or a coffee, and make sure that you are continuing the workshop after 15 minutes. Okay, I'm all refreshed, so let's continue, and one of the challenging parts about breaks is the start after the break, and a couple of things you should do to make this more easy for yourself and for the team is to be really specific on the time that you're going to continue, so for example, say 10:34 or 10:37 as the time that you will continue the workshop, because then it's something people will remind, and it's easier to remember.

And what you can also do is give people an assignment before the break, or maybe pose a question so that they have some time in the break to think about it, and they are eager to restart again. And also, an easy trick is to make them do something as soon as possible after the break because then they can get back into their focus mode.

Okay, Workshop Part Two, which is still quite an agenda, but luckily, because we already did a lot of the groundwork, we can speed up this part of the workshop, and let's start with the alternative to meetings. If you look at the second part of the Guide, there Basecamp describes a couple of examples on how they replace their meetings.

So, for example, this one, an automatic daily, "What did you work on today? " Instead of doing a meeting, they ask the people - via their tool, which is called Basecamp - "What did you work on today," and everyone writes up and shares it with everyone in the company, and this creates a level of transparency, which gives a lot of freedom, loose accountability, and also builds in strong reflection.

And if you do this on a place where everyone can see it, then it's easy to ask questions and comment on anyone's "What did you work on today," and in this way, it's easier to contribute to each other's work. So, let's add that to our workshop, automatic dailies and weeklies, and I just made a screenshot of the Basecamp Guide about the automatic daily and the automatic weekly, and I gave some examples where you could do that.

So, you could write it in Basecamp, which is their project too, or you can use Google Docs, Google Calendar. You can also use WhatsApp to record audio or video messages at the end of every day, and you can, of course, make a choice yourself. And this part of the workshop is really about skill-building, you want people to practice this, and then to make a first iteration of it because then it becomes easier to pick up this routine.

You can use this slide or set up your own system where people fill in their dailies, but it's important that they practice and that you give them a time box to practice within. And then, after the first practice, you can do the same with the weekly, "What will you be working on this week," every Monday morning, and you ask people what would they write down in their first weekly.

And now it seems like a great time to introduce principle 28 from the Basecamp Guide, and that is to ask if things are clear and to be specific in what you want to learn. So, for example, what you could do is you make use of the comment system. So, in this case, I highlighted this part, and I edit the comment, and then I ask a clarifying question.

You can do this with most of the tools, and this is a really important part because then it's easier to collaborate with each other. For the leader of the group, I invite them to do another exercise than writing their first daily and their first weekly, and that's to write a Heartbeat. In this case, I copied the text so I could highlight it.

Heartbeats, they summarize the work for a given team, written by the leader of the group, meant for everyone in the company to read, and they summarize specifically the big picture accomplishments, that they detailed the little things that mattered, and highlight the importance of work, and they also shine a light on challenges and difficulties.

And I invite the leader of the group, while the rest of the group is working on writing their first daily and their first weekly, to write the first Heartbeat. And when their 10 minutes are up, then invite the team to give each other feedback on the dailies, weeklies and the Heartbeat that were written, and you can do that as well with using the comments.

You don't have to actually rewrite them, but the comments help people to reflect on things they could improve. Okay, we're almost there. We want to "Create an experiment for two weeks to partially replace one meeting," and to be able to do that, we have to prioritize which meeting that's going to be, and a great tool for setting priorities is the Impact Effort Matrix.

Is it easy to do or hard? Does it make a lot of impact or is it a waste of time? And by mapping the meetings on this scale, then you can easily make a decision what you want to do with the meeting, and then everything that's in the top-right corner, that's easy and impactful, you should keep, at least for now, and maybe some things that are hard, but still make a lot of impact, you can replace parts of it.

Things that are easy, but a waste of time, they're usually busy work, so try to see if you can completely remove it, or maybe replace it with asynchronous ways of working. And things that are hard to do and a waste of time, please do yourself and your teammates the pleasure by removing that meeting from your calendar.

And the last and final step is to plan an experiment because it would be a waste of time if we just invested 60 to 90 minutes talking about better ways of working together and we didn't follow up on it, and you can do that with the experiment questions. So, "What meeting are we going to replace? " Pick the one in the bottom-right corner, or maybe one from busy work if you think there's room for improvement, and then think about, when are you happy with the outcome, in what timeframe, and what action steps are we going to take to actually make this experiment a success?

And a challenging part of doing an experiment is to actually make sure that you keep to the experiment. So, take some time to discuss on how you want to do that. And that's it because the last step is the Check-out, and we already thought about that, and our workshop is done. So, we can run the workshop, we can help our team in finding better ways of working together.

And if you want to do this workshop with your own team, then look in the comments below. There's a download link, or you can go over to workshopwednesday. co, and you can find the Google Slides template there, or you can download the PDF. Feel free to change anything you want to the template because it's just a starting point, but if you do so, please let me know in the comments below, or send me a message via workshopwednesday.

co because I'm happy to learn from you. Thanks for watching, that's it for now, and see you in the next one. Peace. (upbeat music)