You Don’t Need Status Meetings

The most valuable and scarce resource is time.

As a young startup you must do your best to use it as efficient as possible because you have limited time to show traction and become a profitable business.

Now, there is no doubt that you need to focus and try to spend most of your time on real work. However, we all did it in the past, we get into a room of 5-10 people and everyone is telling the group what they did.

It’s such a waste of time! Even if each person is talking for 5-10min you got here 50-100min of boring meeting which is equal to a waste of time.

Why not have this updates in a tool that let everyone in the team to see what all the others are working on?

In my last 3 startups, we canceled these type of meetings. If you wish to learn what others are working on, just jump to the internal tool (e.g. these days, it could be, Trello, Slack + Snippets or any other system that you found useful for updates).

We did, however, did a short stand-up meetings each morning to see if there are any red-flags or blockers that everyone needs to be aware of. This ten minutes meeting is important in order to solve issues quickly (and not in an email thread of 19 emails).

If you ask people to write daily (or weekly) updates, they don’t like it at the beginning because it looks to them as more work. But when you show them the benefits of time saving and more productivity – They usefully start to fill it.

As a manager, you role is to make your team as productive as possible. If you are able to give your employees more work time and less ‘meeting time’ you are on the right path.

Be strong.

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