The speaker outlines key strategies and considerations for effective remote work and collaboration. It begins by discussing the prevalence of remote work and personal experiences, followed by an exploration of communication methods like Zoom. Emphasis is placed on meeting efficiency, advocating for tracking meeting time and optimizing productivity. Independent work, particularly in software development, is highlighted alongside the necessity of collaboration. The document concludes by encouraging ongoing optimization in remote work practices and invites feedback for further improvement.

Summary

Introduction to Remote Work:

• Discusses the prevalence of remote work due to current circumstances and personal experience with remote work over a decade.

Methods of Connecting with Team Members:

• Explores various methods of communication and collaboration, particularly emphasizing the use of Zoom and screen sharing.

Efficiency in Meetings:

• Highlights the importance of efficiency in meetings, suggesting ways to minimize time spent in meetings and maximize productivity.
• Discusses the impact of excessive meetings on productivity and proposes strategies for effective meeting management.

Quantifying Meeting Time:

• Advocates for tracking and quantifying time spent in meetings to evaluate their effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.
• Considers the indirect costs associated with organizing meetings and suggests metrics for assessing meeting efficiency.

Focus on Independent Work:

• Argues for the importance of allowing time for independent work, especially in software development, and balancing it with collaborative efforts.
• Discusses the core tasks of software development and the necessity of independent contribution.

Optimization and Efficiency in Remote Work:

• Encourages optimization and efficiency in remote work practices, acknowledging the potential for continued remote work in the foreseeable future.
• Invites discussion and feedback on improving remote work efficiency.

Podcast

Check out on Spotify.

Transcript

0:01

Hey there, hope you're doing well. Let's talk about meetings. Given that a lot of us are working remotely, I've been working remotely for over a decade now, maybe even longer. But I know more and more people, folks who had been going to work or prefer to go to work rather than work remotely, even those people are now working remotely, right, given the situation we find ourselves in.

0:26

So remote work means you're connecting with your team members in a variety of ways, Zoom being the most popular way to do it. But what do you use to connect with your team members or do screen sharing?

0:41

It's not so relevant how you go about doing it. This is important, right? So let's talk about a few ways to make that process more efficient than it might only be for you. For standard meetings, I don't know, people may have differing opinions of them. If I'm given a choice, like when we build our own products, we keep our meetings to a necessary minimum.

1:06

And that's like a really small number. Like if we spend more than, yeah, sure we are a smaller team, but regardless, if we find ourselves spending more than like 15-20 minutes in a meeting for the entire day, right? And like any given day, if we spend more than 15-20 minutes in a meeting, I feel like we've there's something lacking.

1:27

And I try to find ways to make that better because a lot of it can be done remotely. And by remotely, I just don't mean physically remotely, but offline, right, or not even offline, I don't know what the right word is. But by not getting into these live meetings. So because the minute you get into a meeting, let's say you're in a meeting with four other people.

1:50

So there's five of you on a call. And let's say you spent even a half-hour discussing whatever it is that you're going to discuss when the collective human hours spent in that meeting would be like 2 1/2 hours, right. And let's say just take a round number.

2:05

Let's say five of us got on a call and we spent one hour discussing whatever it is that we want to discuss at that point of time. So it's five human hours spent in meetings cumulatively, right. So if the five of us worked in the team, we had 40 hours to accomplish something in that given day.

2:26

If we spent one hour on this, so it's five hours gone, right? I'm sure it's important that you meet connected people so you can get things done. But sometimes then, I've seen this. More often than not, a lot of these meetings have too many people and not a whole lot of stuff actually gets accomplished during the course of that call.

2:48

And I think I read somewhere that this may or may not be true, but I think in Amazon for instance, I believe they don't. I read this a while ago actually. They make sure that the number of people who show up in a meeting can be fed by like 2 large pizzas or something like that.

3:08

Except that our large pizzas are pretty large. They're much larger than they are in other parts of the world. Like if we go to Europe, the pizzas are much smaller, but even large pizzas as we know of them. If you order two of them and if you cannot have any more people, I think that's a great number, especially for a company that's behemoth like Amazon, that's huge, right?

3:30

So if they can keep their meetings to humans that can consume that the two pizzas can serve or lesser. And I think the rest of the world is a whole lot smaller, right? You're talking like $1.7 trillion companies and then say a few of them in that range.

3:49

The rest of the world is as big as these companies might be. They're a whole lot smaller. And then you come to start-ups and then you come to something like Snoopal, which is really small, at least at this point of time. We want to keep our meetings to be really, really short. We want fewer people in these meetings and we want to have a clear end result.

4:09

Now, you could see all of this, the agenda and all of those things that you discuss, but sometimes you don't want to spend too much time setting up this meeting and deciding what should be accomplished in the meeting. All of that is cost indirectly associated with that meeting. Now if you send a request, whether it's on Slack or email or whatever it is, and then people are available, not available, and then you reschedule, set up a different time, all of that cost is tied to the meeting.

4:35

So it's not just the five human hours that I mentioned earlier. It's all of the time that I've spent prior to the meeting itself in getting that meeting organized essentially. Hey, that's a cost. So long story short, what I'm trying to say is meetings are great as long as they provide quantifiable value.

4:56

So I'm pretty sure there's got to be a way to tell after you spend a month. Let's say you're a team of whatever number of people and you've gotten on a number of these calls. It'd be nice to see a metric that says how much time did this team spend collectively in meetings.

5:13

And I'm talking about organized meetings, meaning someone actually sends an invite or whatever. You could not spontaneous ones where someone slacks, you get on a call and you have a 5-minute discussion. I'm not calling that. You don't have to factor that in because that becomes even harder to do it.

5:29

But it will be good to know, right, collectively how much time was spent on Zoom calls as far as this team is concerned. And I think that'll give a great number because let's see if it's five people working in your team. So it's 40 hours a day about, I'm sorry.

5:46

Yeah, 40 hours a day, right. So 200 hours a week and about 800 hours a month, give or take, maybe 900 hours, right. In that period of time, how much time was spent in any kind of a call, meaning you not being an individual contributor?

6:01

Because a lot of jobs can only function when you're talking to somebody. But I'm talking more from a software development standpoint, as a developer, as an architect in that space, as someone who's producing software that can help other people, a lot of it is actually done as an independent contributor.

6:21

Sure, you need to make sure you integrate with other teams, you need to understand the requirements, you exchange specs as a contract, all of that stuff. Having said that, acknowledging all of that, I think the majority of work, at least in the world of software development, if you just take that small narrow space when it comes to building software, the rest of it you have to sell, advertise, market your campaigns and all of that.

6:47

There's a whole lot more that goes into it. But the core part of it, as I see it is the building that software. A lot of that gets done independently by a number of contributors, right? So for getting that done, I think a good amount of your hours should actually be available to be done outside of these meetings.

7:10

So you want to get a sense for how much time are we spending as a team on these calls and are we getting the value for all of that time spent or can we be making some changes? I don't know. At least that's my perspective. I'd love to know what you think.

7:27

If you're working for a much larger organizations, maybe you do things differently. But it'll be good to know how we can optimize and become more efficient as we continue to work in the remote capacity. Which might be for a while.

7:42

Yep. Thanks.