Think of the last time you were in a long, boring meeting. You probably accepted the invite by reflex, to "stay in the loop”. Unwittingly committing to losing precious time you'll never get back. During the meeting, your attention faded. You forgot why you were there, and started checking emails. You saw an invite for “Project X planning & sync” and clicked "accept". Prolonging the vicious cycle of pain.
Meetings. They are snakes slithering across your calendar, eating your time, camouflaged as productivity.
Our core mission at Slite has always been to help teams work more thoughtfully. We've built tools and methods that helped us turn our meeting culture around. It requires change, but it’s dead simple.
Add these mistakes up and you might end up not only with poor outcomes from meetings, but dreading them.
Short answer: because we've taken the bad part out and turned meetings (specially marketing meetings) into work sessions.
Let me illustrate how Laure, leading Marketing at Slite, and I work. Every Friday I receive a notification in Slite to a doc called “Marketing session”, that I can go through on my own time.
It’s a straightforward doc structured in two parts:
Come Monday, the 2-4 meeting attendees know what we'll be talking about and we can start working together straight away.
It seems simple because it is. The real challenge is to commit to this process as a team.
The first step is to reduce the number of attendees per meeting, so that no meeting feels like an extra hustle for anyone.
Second, Slite can encourage your team to develop a written culture. It leads to well-prepared meetings with traceable takeaways. Writing things down doesn't stop at meetings: it can impact your entire company.
Slite is built to give your team a simple space to document their work, encouraging a better meeting culture is just the tip of the iceberg. Check it out and if you have hacks that solve your meeting issues reach out and let me know!
Christophe Pasquier is Slite’s co-founder and CEO. Chris’ goal is to help teams do incredible work in better environments, by helping them embrace remote work and async communication. He currently lives in Berlin with his wife and baby Noé. Find him @Christophepas on Twitter!