Ep 110: Meeting Minimalism
Communication Frameworks That Save Time
SUMMARY
The average creative professional spends 23 hours per week in meetings. Yet research shows that over 70% of those meetings actively prevent your best creative work from happening. As creative entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves trapped in an endless cycle of meetings that drain our energy, disrupt our creative flow, and ultimately hinder our productivity. In this episode, we dive into the concept of meeting minimalism and explore practical frameworks to help you reclaim your time and boost your creative output.
When we think about meetings, we immediately recognize the visible costs – the time blocked on our calendars. However, there are hidden costs that often go unnoticed. Context switching can take up to 25 minutes before we regain deep focus. Creative flow disruption breaks our ability to produce our best work. Decision fatigue drains the energy needed for making creative choices. And let's not forget the financial impact – calculating the hourly rates of everyone involved can be eye-opening. Perhaps most significant is the opportunity cost – what creative work isn't getting done while you're sitting in that unnecessary meeting?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Create a Note-First Culture: Write things down before requesting face time. Documentation-first approaches eliminate unnecessary impromptu meetings and help you determine if an issue can wait for a scheduled meeting or be handled asynchronously.
⚡️ Implement the Meeting Decision Tree: Before scheduling a meeting, ask four critical questions: Is immediate two-way interaction required? Does this require multiple perspectives simultaneously? Is complex emotion involved that text cannot convey? Is this a relationship-building moment? If you answer "no" to all four, use an alternative communication method.
⚡️ Use the Right Communication Tool for the Job: Status updates can often be handled through Slack messages, project management software updates, or Loom videos instead of live meetings. Create a decision matrix for your team to determine when to use chat, email, video messages, or actual meetings.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Not only do you have the calendar visible cost of that meeting, but you have preparation time and then follow-up time as well."
💬 "On average, it takes a person 25+ minutes to regain deep focus when they have to switch context."
💬 "Establish the feedback criteria even before you review the work, right? So that we understand this is what it is. We're not coming in here with different criteria."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️Book Recommendation: "Read This Before Our Next Meeting" by Al Pittampalli
⚡️Free Download: Creative Meeting Success Framework
⚡️ EOS Level 10 Meetings: Learn the Identify, Discuss, Solve (IDS) method
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
The average creative professional spends 23 hours per week in meetings. Yet research shows that over 70% of those meetings actively prevent your best creative work from happening. Today, we're going to dive into meeting minimalism and how it can change the game for you and your team. Let's get into it. Taking creatives from chaos to clarity.
Welcome to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers and all creative entrepreneurs who are seeking practical and actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process coach and consultant, and I help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together.
I'm so very excited to be with you on this episode, episode 110 of the Creativity Made Easy podcast. We wouldn't have gotten this far without you. And so thank you for listening. While you're listening, I would love for you to subscribe, rate, review on whatever platform you're listening or watching on. Listen on all podcast platforms and you can watch on YouTube. Just search creativity made easy on YouTube and my channel will pop up and while you're there subscribe rate and review there as well.
I want to direct you to some amazing free resources that I have on my website. You can go to Dustin Pead dot com slash free that's D-U-S-T-I-N P-E-A-D dot com slash free for all sorts of free resources, including the ones that I may mention in this episode. Lastly, before we get into today, I want to remind you, you can follow me on social media at Dustin Pead - follow along a little bit of behind the scenes action there and anything that we have coming up to promote or just some really great conversation centered around creative production. All right, let's get into today's episode.
I do have a confession to make. I really love meetings and it's because I'm an extrovert. It's because I like to be around people as much as I can. I get that energy, but here's what I don't love. I don't love meetings without purpose. I don't love meetings without an agenda. I don't love meetings without a set amount of time, without a goal in mind for that meeting. And so today we're going to talk about this meeting minimalism and some different frameworks that I have, communication frameworks that can save you time from these endless amounts of meetings that are taken away from your creative production.
All right, let's talk about what the true cost of meetings in creative businesses are, right? There's the visible costs, right? You can look at your time on your calendar. And you can see, look, it's taking up time. Not only is it taking up time when the meeting is actually happening, but it's taking up preparation time so that I can actually be prepared for that meeting and be ready to discuss whatever it is that we're hopefully know what we're going to be talking about, right? There's also the follow-up time after that meeting. It's the meeting after the meeting in which you have to go follow up and, on the things that you talked about in there, maybe there was decisions made that you need to follow up on, or if it's a, wasn't such a great meeting, maybe you need to go get clarity on what just happened in that meeting, right?
So not only do you have the calendar visible cost of that meeting, but you have preparation time and then follow up time as well. There's also some hidden costs that I want to talk about here for a moment. And the first one is this, and we've talked about this many times on the show before, but it's this idea of context switching, context switching meaning that our brains have to go from focused on one item to now being focused on another item and it takes our brains a moment to catch up to the context in which the new thing is happening for us to really realize it's where we talk a lot about the future you note taking methodology that I talk about on this podcast all the time is where we get into that context and we can we can quickly remember what it was that we're supposed to be doing in that it's that future you note taking methodology.
But in this world of meetings, there's a hidden cost here of context switching and on average, right? It takes a person 25 plus minutes to regain deep focus when they have to switch context. So imagine that an average of 25 minutes, there's a hidden cost layer of you switching from one thing to the next for your mind to be able to get context. And you'll notice this. Sometimes you'll be sitting in a meeting and it'll take you almost 25 to 30 minutes usually before you feel like, okay, now I understand what's going on here and now I can start to contribute to the overall success of the topic in which we're talking about.
There's another hidden cost too, and it's very real. And you might feel it more than it is hidden, but it's creative flow disruption, right? Meetings break up that flow state that we've talked about in previous episodes that help us produce our best creative work. And let's be honest with these meetings, another hidden costs, again, it might not be super hidden. It might be really on the forefront of your conscious, right? But it's decision fatigue, right? Too many meetings can drain our decision-making energy. And that energy is needed for creativity. It's needed for our creative choices.
Some other hidden costs associated with meetings, obviously there's financial impact, right? You can calculate the actual dollar cost of a meeting. Who all is in the meeting, what their team hourly rates are, how long that, you know, multiplied to how long that meeting is. So, just for simplicity sake, let's say you had a team of five and they're all in that meeting and everybody in that meeting makes $10 an hour. Then that meeting is costing you $50 for one hour. So obviously numbers are a lot bigger than that. $10 an hour. My son makes that at his job at 14 years old. But you get what I'm saying, right? You have to understand the financial impact that you're spending on that meeting. Is it actually worth it?
And another hidden cost that I want to talk about before we wrap up to here is opportunity costs. And what I mean is what creative work isn't getting done while you're in that meeting, what opportunities to advance the current projects and what opportunities to create new to create new connections or new project opportunities. What what of those are being lost because you were in a meeting instead?
And so there's lots of upfront, very visible costs. We talked about calendar time during the meeting, before the meeting, after the meeting. But then there's the hidden costs, context switching, creative flow, decision fatigue, financial impact, how much is the meeting actually costing you to have, and then the opportunity costs as well.
All right, let's get into some communication strategies that can help minimize all of these meetings that we find ourselves in every single week. The first thing is this is be a note first culture or a documentation first culture. You need to write things down before requesting FaceTime. And here's what I mean by this is like, Oh, I totally meant to ask Ted about this one thing. I'm going to pop over in Ted's office real quick and ask him about this thing and see if he has a moment to talk about this. See if he has quote unquote five minutes, right? To talk about this, which he talked about in last week's episode. Let's if he has five minutes to talk about this.
But if you just pause for a second before you get up from your desk and walk over to Ted's office and you write down what it is that you actually need to talk to him about or what the question is, you will begin to observe it for what it is and know, you know what? That actually would be better served in a meeting that we already have set up. Maybe it's a one-on-one, maybe it's a departmental meeting, maybe it's an L10 leadership meeting if you're doing the EOS model. That'll be better served to bring up in that case. I'm just going to hold that for now. I'm going to stay focused on what I'm doing right now. I'm not going to disrupt Ted from what he's doing right now. We don't need an impromptu meeting for this. So document first or note first or writing down first, creating that culture among you and your team goes a long way.
Another opportunity here is progress updates. Some, some meetings don't need to be meetings. All right. We talked about this before and we're going to talk about this later on in this episode as well. Some meetings just need to be an email or a Slack message, right? If it's a progress update, structure your daily and weekly updates to eliminate these status meetings, right? And I love status meetings. One of my favorite meetings that I talk about all the time is what I call the maps meeting. It's a meeting about project status, right? And what, but what we're really talking about here is not just what's the status, but where we're going. And that's why I like to call it the maps meeting because hey, where are we going next? Where do we need to shift next? It's a little bit of an editorial style meeting.
But if it's simply just, hey, this is where we're at on these projects, then we're a simple Slack message away. I do like to hold a short, less than 15 minute meeting at the beginning of the week just to say, here's what's ahead this week. I've already sent you this. Everybody already knows what's on their schedule for this week, knows what's expected of them this week. Are there any questions that are worth being asked with all of us here. If not, we'll take it offline. Have a great day. Check in when you need to check in, that kind of thing, right?
So progress updates, get in the habit of using those digitally, whether it be an email or a Slack message, whatever it is, structure those into your daily and weekly updates so that you can eliminate status meetings. And there's a few tools here that I want to recommend for you. Obviously, any type of project updates or status tracking can be done in your project management software. For us, that's Asana. Also, knowledge of how to do certain things. Maybe we don't need a meeting for that, but you can easily have those things documented in your Google Docs or your Notion, whatever you use for all of your company-wide SOPs and structures. And then lastly, Loom videos. So huge. I talk about this all the time. You can get a free Loom account. You can have a video that goes up to five minutes for free. And you can shoot a quick explanation instead of five, instead of live walkthroughs over and over and over again. You can shoot that one video once, send it to your team and go, hey, I know you're probably gonna forget this later, but just hang on to that link, save it somewhere where you can reference it when you need to relearn it or remember the steps for this over and over and over.
So use your project management system for updates and statuses. Use your Google Docs, your Notion for knowledge management, and use Loom videos to explain things instead of having constant live walkthroughs. Listen, last thing I want to share with you about these communication tactics, and I'm not going to go super deep into it because I've already done this on a few episodes ago. It might even have been last week's episode when we talked about the creative brief mastery. But written creative briefs, these detailed briefs, are going to eliminate these constant clarification meetings, right? If you have something that you can go back to each and every time to realign yourself or your team around what the project is supposed to be about, because you did a really good job at your creative brief document, then it will eliminate needs for all of these clarification meetings over and over and over again. So go back and listen to last week's episode on the creative brief mastery for that.
Now let's talk about when we need to meet versus using some of these alternative communications, because there are actually times when a meeting is helpful, right? And we've talked before about, like, I have on my website the five ways to make every creative meeting successful. It's the Creative Meeting Success Framework. You can go to dustinpead.com slash free and download that now. And a lot of the things I'm going talk about here are included in that as well.
You need to have what's referred to often as like a meeting decision tree or a meeting decision flow chart, right? Number one, ask yourself, is immediate two-way interaction required? Or can I just send this out and whenever they get to it, they can respond? How immediate is this two-way interaction for the meeting? And if it's a super immediate, then you know you need to have a meeting. And if it's not, be honest, maybe it can wait and you can wait for return communication back.
Number two, does this require, does this issue, right, or does this meeting require multiple perspectives all at the same time? Really get ruthless about this. Does your meeting, does this issue that you're working on, does it require multiple perspectives all at the same time simultaneously? If it's a brainstorm, then obviously yes, you're gonna need to have that kind of energy in the room. Or if it's a go off, work on this, come back and reconvene, then you can talk about that there. But ask yourself, does this problem require multiple perspectives simultaneously?
Third question to ask yourself when deciding if you need to have a meeting. Is complex emotion involved that text cannot convey? This is where a lot of leaders mess up by canceling meetings across the board is because they think I can just read the text and understand I can read the email, I can read the Slack message, I can read the Teams message, whatever it is, I can read that and understand exactly what's going on. We don't need a meeting for this. But if there's complex emotion involved, something that's being shifted or added or taken away, we're still dealing with people here. If there's complex emotion involved, that a text just can't convey, then yeah, it's time for a meeting.
And then number four, this is my favorite one as an Enneagram four, is this meeting a relationship building moment? Now, not just social time, but deep relationship building moment, a moment to build trust, a moment to develop each other in a one-on-one or a team department environment. Is this meeting a relationship building moment and if the answer is yes to any of these if is immediate two-way communication or immediate two-way interaction required if you can answer yes to that meeting does this require multiple perspectives at the same time if you answer yes have the meeting is this art is complex emotion involved that text can't convey if the answer is yes have a meeting and lastly is there is this a relationship building moment or opportunity if the answer is yes.
Again, be ruthless with these yeses, right? Don't just say yes to everything because you want the meeting. But if you can say yes to any one of these four, then the meeting is valid. With that, let's equally talk about some meeting alternatives. If we don't necessarily need to have a meeting, if you answered no to those four things, then what can we do? All right, so first thing, create a decision matrix for different communication methods, right? Like, hey, is this something that's going to be really more complex and detailed? Then I'm going to If that's the case, then the matrix is telling me that I need to send an email with attachments and yada, yada, yada. Hey, if this is just a quick question, can I put it on Teams or Slack and schedule it for later? What does that look like? What are the parameters for when it's just a quick question versus it needs a meeting? That's going to be different for you and every organization. Ask yourself when you should use, again, like chat versus email or video message versus a meeting, a loom video versus an in-person meeting.
Have those decisions. And if it doesn't fit the criteria of a meeting, then use the alternative that it does fit. And lastly, respectfully decline unnecessary meetings. And I say respectfully because you don't want to come across as a jerk that just says no to all meetings. But you need to learn how to do it with grace and understanding and communicate why that this meeting at this particular time with this agenda just isn't necessary for you to be in. And that will begin to set boundaries with you and your team and your clients that will go a long way.
The whole this should be an email test, right? What does that mean? This should be an We always say this meeting should just be an email. We love texting each other while we're in meetings. We're not the one running the meeting, and we're just saying this whole meeting could just be an email. So what are three questions to ask before you even schedule that meeting to avoid the, should be an email, messages going on in your meeting while you're trying to run it.
Number one, is this primarily one way information sharing? Is it just information sharing that's coming from one to all or one to the other? Then it could be an email or Slack message or Teams message. Number two, can decisions be made without real FaceTime discussion? If you, if that other person has the autonomy and they need to make the decision, you can say, Hey, here's the issue. I trust you to make the decision. Keep me posted. Bam. A meeting does not need to happen. It's an email. It's a Slack message. It's a Teams message. And then number three, can we achieve the same outcome in less than half of the time with some digital or written communication? So going back to the other alternatives in the meeting, can we achieve the same outcome with those alternatives? Then we can with half the time. If we can, then it doesn't need to be a meeting. It can be written or digital communication.
So we've also all been there. We've been in a meeting where like, yeah, we've run through the decision matrix. We've asked all the right questions. This does need to be a meeting, but God help us. This meeting is terrible. So let's talk about how to run some efficient creative reviews and feedback sessions. These are the types of meetings that we find ourselves in as creatives quite a bit. And so there's this focus feedbacks methodology that we need to talk about.
And the focus feedback is this. Number one, set clear objectives for the meeting or for the review, for the feedback. What are we trying to accomplish here? Every meeting should have that right at the beginning. One person leading the meeting should say, is what we're trying to accomplish in this meeting. So that everybody knows when that happens or else otherwise it becomes what's known as a marathon meeting. And no one really knows when it's over because we don't know what the objective for the meeting was to begin with.
Number two, establish the criteria before the meeting, right? Establish the feedback criteria even before you review the work, right? So that we understand this is what it is. We're not coming in here with different criteria. We're saying, hey, this is the criteria in which we're reviewing this. This is the criteria in which we're providing feedback on. And that's what this time is for. All other ideas, those are for other times. For now, this is what we're using. And then you can also use time boxing techniques right so like a 10 minute review rule so hey we're gonna set a timer right now We're gonna talk about this for 10 minutes and when the timer is over we've talked about it enough. And if the problem still isn't solved get better at leading that discussion. Learn from it and move on have another separate private conversation if you need to but be ruthless about those time boxing techniques.
Again, we talked about ways to accomplish the same thing without actually having a meeting. And so let's use this whole review feedback kind of topic in the same light here. So a way to avoid it is to set up some collaborative tools for feedback. Asana, Frame, Google Docs, Loom videos, all these different things will allow you to get that feedback digitally without having to have a verbal conversation about it in a digital or in-person meeting.
Create those feedback templates that streamline responses. Hey, what are the five things that we're looking for every time we review this type of work? Those are the five questions. Those are the five areas. We're going to have them be multiple choice or ranked or whatever. And that way the feedback is streamlined and consistent every single time. And it leaves little room for these rabbit trail conversations that happen in a meeting all the time. You can do that outside of a meeting to enhance your review process.
And the last thing is to use video annotations for detailed visual feedback. Again, this is where Loom coming in handy. Someone sends you a design, you need to review it, open up the design on your computer, start a Loom video, it's got yourself in the bottom corner of it. You can talk through, use your mouse to point at different things, go, like what you did here, I like the texture here, what I'd like to see is something different in this region right here. And you're able to verbally give those annotations and reviews and feedback on the Loom video with some visual feedback rather than take less than five minutes to do that rather than having an hour long meeting about this one design that needs to be reviewed.
The last thing I want to mention here on how to have effective meetings is we talked a lot earlier about the EOS. If you don't know what that is, it's the Entrepreneur Operating System. It was developed by a guy named Gene, Geno, is it Geno Whitman? Geno Whitman? Geno Whitman, I think is his name. Incredible. lot of people use that type of methodology and he has in there all sorts of different types of meetings, but one that is extremely streamlined that we use a lot in my businesses is the level 10 meeting or the L 10 meeting. And this is, uh, has a segmented agenda with very strict time boxes. We're going to spend five minutes kind of warming up to the topic. Then we're going to talk about some major kind of upper level issues and then we're going to spend the bulk of our time.
Called the IDS method the bulk of our discussion the bulk of this meeting is going to be around IDs which is identify Discuss and solve we're gonna identify the problem We're gonna discuss the problem and then when it's all said and done guess what we're actually gonna solve the problem So level 10 meetings EOS check them out use the IDS method every single time identify the problem discuss the problem solve the problem.
All right, in closing, so what do we do now? We have these meetings that are taking up way too much of our time. They're unorganized when we have them. It's just a complete time cycle. Most of them should be in email. So what do we do? I want to give you some options. I don't want you to do all of these. I just want you to pick one over the next quarter, month, and try these things out.
Number one, conduct a communication audit to evaluate your current meeting culture. This could be an easy survey monkey or Google, Google form survey that you send out to everybody on your team and say, Hey, look, just rate how you think these meetings are. Do you think we have too many meetings or not enough meetings or our meetings productive or not productive? Are they too long or are they too short? Ask those questions to get some feedback.
Another option, create a two week experiment where you're going to implement meeting minimalism as a trial. Just say, Hey, you know what, for the next week, we're going to be our next two weeks. We're going to be extremely ruthless about saying no to unnecessary meetings and just try it and see how it goes. Obviously do with respect, do with grace and kindness and be upfront about that communication. Don't just shut them down and say, we're trying something. Trust us. No one buys that. Be upfront about how we're going to do this over the next couple of weeks to try that out.
A third option. This is a big option, but it's a really big, it's, it's a really worthwhile option is to get some team buy-in, get everybody on board with new communication frameworks. I know this is going to say like, are you telling me to have a meetings to have less meetings? Maybe, or maybe you should shoot an email out there. Hey, everybody, we want to get better about the way that we communicate and we want to get better about how often we have meetings and the quality of those meetings. So we'd love to get some ideas from you on how we can improve that. Right. Send it out there, get some buy-in with the team.
Number four, track certain metrics around your current communication strategy. Measure the impact on productivity and creative output. Are the meetings that you're having, are they increasing productivity and creative output or are they decreasing? Why or why not? And lastly, if you want to start with a gradual implementation plan with one team or project before you expand it out to your entire.
I want to leave you with a few resources before we wrap up this episode. There's a great book by Al Pitamampali. I hope I'm saying his name right. It's P-I-T-T-A-M-P-A-L-L-I. Al, we love you, but I don't know how to say your last name. Google that. Check it out. This book. Read this before our next meeting. Fantastic book. A lot of things that we talked about here in that book as well. do have that template for you on dustinpead.com slash meetings is the creative meeting success framework. Go download that. There's pre-meeting strategies in there, meeting structure, feedback systems, templates, follow-up formulas, all of that in there. Also check out the L10 meetings, the level 10 meetings from EOS to identify, discuss, and solve problems in your meeting more efficiently.
I want to remind you all resources can be found at dustinpead.com. Would love for you to follow me at Dustin Pead on social media for more content just like this. cannot wait to be with you for our next episode. We do have some very fun special guests coming up that I cannot wait to talk to you about. We'll catch you next time on Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have a great week.