These 7 words have become the oxygen of the corporate workplace. People are using them as if their life depends on them.
Here is a suggestion: What if you could get on no more than 3 calls per week? (My ideal would be no more than one, but we start small.)
The truth is, the more we get on phone calls or video calls, the more our focus dwindles. Now so many people have to put aside their important tasks in order to “be live” in front of a boss who thinks you should be working 100 hours a week, not 70 or 90.
If the boss does not trust them that they are doing important work and believe the meeting is more important, should the boss have a meeting with the other boss and think about giving their team something important instead?
If the boss thinks that the mess in their thoughts is more important than the maze on their team’s tables, shouldn’t the boss raise the standards of their work?
Most importantly, how can a boss really be respected if they do not really respect the output their team brings to the table?
However, why so many people prefer meetings or calls, instead of text or email or voice notes? Because it proves to other people that they are working. “I am important. In order to prove that point, I want to have a pointless meeting.”
The deeper reality of these endless meetings is that most human beings have no idea how to validate themselves as a person, so they keep seeking validation in the form of:
“We covered a lot in today’s meeting” whereas we just spoke endlessly about the two actionable points that could have been a 40-second email, but we chose a 55-minute meeting and closed the meeting “before” the 60-minute mark—because hey, look, I am working so hard!
The more you go deep into any person’s psyche of wanting to have a meeting, you always find one ingredient missing in their life and personality as whole: Validation. They just don’t know how to be free and just be! And they carry it with pride on their shoulders, rarely realizing it is the chip on their and their family’s and their company’s shoulders.
These “let’s have a video call” people may be filthy rich. They may be minting millions. They may be doing philanthropy (by making sure the media covers it).
However, none of these ensure the relationship these people have with the person in the mirror.
“A fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love cannot be bought. You have to earn it every day,” said Naval Ravikant.
The validation we are talking about, is the calm mind. The calm mind craves more of calmness, not chaos. Hand on our heart, we know what most meetings are. Including the “important” ones. We have simply got on a train to nowhere-land because everyone else has also boarded that train. We are now people of second AC or business class air tickets huddling like nomads in a Mumbai local of “let’s get on a quick call”. Because we have no idea how high (second AC or business class) our true worth is.
What happens when we stop having so much meetings and get to the point in emails or messages? We will have a LOT of time to spare. That’s the most horrific thing on the planet for most people. Because now you have to face yourself. “Oh, no, no no not at all. Let me pick a flaw of one of my colleagues and scold them, and then we will have a 1:1 for 90 minutes and sort that out. After that, maybe it is time to move the Google doc weekly email that requires 3 minutes of my time to go through in depth, to a weekly cadence of at-least 60 minutes, that invariably gets pushed over by 30 minutes, because, you know, you are the ones I seek validation for my emptiness from.”
People are too frightened to face themselves. So they face the screen with a frown on their face and an f-word that freezes before ebbing out of the mouth.
In a podcast, Nikhil Kamath is speaking to other CXOs of Zerodha, and he says I am not working more than 90 minutes a day, but I pretend to work so long because you are sitting in the cabin across me and pretending to work. Truer words have never been spoken before.
Does that mean we don’t do calls? Quite the opposite. We will now do calls or have meetings because truly want to connect with our teammates. We will conduct meetings because we have been missing our colleagues. The pace at which we are proudly getting into “back-to-back” meetings, I wonder if anyone has any other emotion other than hate or “whatever” for their colleagues.
Where did this whole pandemic of meetings arise in the first place?
We have no idea how to spend time with ourselves. We were taught as kids that getting bored means you aren’t working hard. The neighbour’s kid was studying 14 hours every day. Also, most people are now glued to our phones most of their waking hours. Thus, they are consuming content created for their entertainment, instead of pausing and doing some inner-tainment. As a result, we unknowingly keep ourselves busy. The unconscious knows your needs more than you project them to come to the surface, and will do everything to make sure it meets them. In this case, the need of staying engaged and busy and quietly craving validation through the lens of “I am too busy, even on weekends!”
In the pandemic of coronavirus when we all were working from home, for every meeting that top executives had to fly the morning flight full of folders in their laptop and sleep in their eyes, moved to the screen. Of all the (positive and negative) effects of the pandemic, no one ever notes about the positive effect of time being saved, because people love being busy again. No one talks about the negative effects too, because for them time wastage was a feature, not a bug.
At this point, what do you and I do? Can one person even think of changing the culture?
I’d suggest we all should learn to communicate over emails and text messages, or voice messages at best. I know, you are not a writer. “Easy for you to say, you are a writer,” you might think as I am writing this.
But here is the deal: The time you are wasting on meetings is not my precious time. It is yours. If you won’t make an effort to suggest feedback on a doc, share the two to-do’s over an email, or give a heads up on messages or emails; and would prefer meetings or phone calls to do all of these, you are squandering your time. And life. Not mine.
If you need a screen no matter what, record a loom. Trust that the people on the other side will watch it when they are supposed to (2-4-8 hours later) and do what is needed of them. If you are conducting video meetings or in-person meetings because you don’t trust your team that they will watch the Loom, the problem that we need to solve the foremost is not even remotely related to meetings.
When I was a kid, all I wanted to ask my father was one question. “How much money do you make in a day?” I wanted to calculate the months of pocket money I would have to save, so I could give him that money, and he would stay at home for ONE day. Unfortunately, the emotional distance between us was such that I could not gather myself to ask that question.
As I grew up, I attracted emotionally unavailable people in my life all of the time, because that was my default setting of love: Emotionally unavailable. It was only through rigorous soul-searching and endless tear-jerking I figured that I am loved and deserve to be around people who are there, and are happy to be around me.
Which is why, perhaps, you must guard your time like it is the only thing you have. Because it is. The 8-9 figure salary in your bank account is good, and take it from me, your business will only grow when you reduce the number of meetings to minimum. You will have much more focus, some more free time (no, you attention seeking bro, it ain’t a crime), and you will know yourself a bit better each day.
All of these have a direct effect on your work. And the mental and emotional health of your kids. Is there anything more important than that?
We were having meetings to make sure our work got better and our kids got happier in the first place, isn’t it? Now is the time to pick the “sahajta ka marg” as a default lifestyle.
Work hard, but don’t work hard on working hard. Be easy as you work hard. Oh, by the way, of all the people I know who love 70 or 90 hour workweeks are exactly the ones who love getting on 20,945 calls every week! Phew!!