Over the years, business has developed the system of meetings.
I have attended billions of meetings in my life for various types of subjects (at least that's what it feels like).
The worst of those meetings are the ones where people do not understand the principle of asynchronous work.
Asynchronous work is now becoming quite fashionable, particularly with the utilization of one person video meetings.
Recently, my friend and mentor, Chris Barrow and I shared a short email conversation about asynchronous and synchronous work and defining that for dental teams.
Chris has developed a very nice laminate and diagram for this to inform the people in his 100 club the difference between these and how they could be used.
What I did notice with Chris’s version of this is that he discussed WhatsApp as a way of asynchronous communication.
So, you type a message and send it and wait until the person reads it and they send a response back in their own time.You both don't have to be in the same place at the same time, no meeting required.
On WhatsApp you can drop documents or video to do this.
The only problem with WhatsApp is it's owned by meta and is designed to suck you into meta at all times.
If you think that's not true, then ask yourself why WhatsApp is free.
And so, the trick, at least I believe, with asynchronous technology is to pay for it.
If you pay for technology then it is the product, and you are buying the product and it is the developer’s responsibility to make the product as good as possible so that you continue to buy it.
If you do not pay for the technology, then you are the product, and it is the developer’s responsibility to sell your attention to pay for the product.
WhatsApp is designed to pull you into Facebook and Instagram and other places on your phone (it's why it's never been very good on any other device apart from your phone).
And so, with the development of technology such as Slack (our massive, chosen partner for asynchronous communication in the practice) or Loom, the asynchronous video platform, which is almost certainly likely to be bought by Slack any minute now or Asana or any of these other asynchronous meeting tools; the key is to use them properly to reduce down the time you spend in meetings, which are of no use whatsoever.
Putting 10 people in a room together is very, very ineffective unless you can make it as effective as possible.
I attend school governors’ meetings once every term at the West Bridgford school in Nottingham which have in the past lasted 4.5 hours (can you imagine me sitting still for 4.5 hours).
They recently tried to time limit agenda items and ask people to read things before they came and managed to trim the meeting to 3.5 hours.
It's possible to trim most of your meetings down to 30 minutes or less with the appropriate use of asynchronous technology.
Again, what asynchronous technology does is not make you less human but give you the opportunity to have time to be more human when you're not locked in meetings, listening to someone else.
Check it out and look at it.
You can use it in any size of business for very little money.
Blog Post Number - 3325