We Should Have Meeting Jubilee

Introduction

I have yet to meet the person that simply loves meetings. After nearly two years of staring at our friends and colleagues over Zoom, a few things are clear:

1. Remote and hybrid work aren’t going away. So this will be our version of “work” for the foreseeable future.

2. Zoom and commensurate technologies are bad for your physical health, psychological health, and productivity.

3. If we’re going to make room for healthy workplaces with sustainable professional growth and reasonable hours, something is going to have to give.

Meetings Aren’t Necessarily Bad

Meetings have always had a place in higher education. After all, we work in highly decentralized organizations with unclear and often conflicting goals (Birnbaum all the way). Much of our time is getting alignment and coordination.

“Committee work” is a classic version of the service to your institution or academic discipline that is required for faculty promotion and tenure. In other words, “meetings” are basically part of the job.

And to be clear: meetings aren’t inherently bad. They do serve a critical communication function and are a great way to interact with new stakeholders with whom personal relationships matter. I personally started a new position during COVID-19 and have really appreciated “meet and greet” meetings which have allowed me to learn about the institution by talking to people rather than reading documentation.¹.

Still, meetings make it difficult to do the creative, often solitary analyses, visualizations, data pulls, survey design, management, and communications. More and more, that work is being done after hours or on the weekends. In my experience, this is leading to exhaustion and burnout.

Meetings as an Optimization Problem

One issue with meetings is that they are too easy to spin up and too difficult to tear down. This is largely because people rarely take the time to calculate the costs and opportunity costs of meetings over other work.² In fact, meetings have become the default version of what we think of as work.

For me, the biggest problem with meetings is that they are so difficult to schedule. Since meeting scheduling is de-centralized and lacks broad coordination, they are scattered in a sub-optimal way across the day and week.

How often do you try to find a time to meet, only to recognize that you have entered into an unsolvable NP-hard space where no brute force algorithm can find an optimal solution in our existing space-time reality?³

If we simply scheduled meetings in a coordinated way, we could become more efficient, and also have an easier time finding common meeting times when ad-hoc discussions are necessary and important.

Proposed Solutions

To get out of this problem, one could programmatically optimize meeting times. My guess is that the constraints (times, dates, availability, people involved, recurrence, picking kids up from school and so on) would make it extremely complex. Furthermore, any changes to those constraints could have ongoing downstream impacts across the entire network of meetings.

Instead, my proposal comes from a substantially less technical place: the Hebrew Bible. In the book of Leviticus, there is a suggestion that once every 50 years, a ram’s horn is blown to signal the elimination of all debts. This concept is referred to as “Jubilee” or “Debt Jubilee”.⁴

A jubilee essentially wipes the slate clean allowing all of the entanglements to become gloriously disentangled.

Therefore, my proposal to create Meeting Jubilee.

How it Might Work

• Once per year, upon the return from the winter holiday break, the University Chancellor or President would signal the beginning of Meeting Jubilee. This would happen via ram’s horn or email.

• After this notice, different units would spend a bit of time planning for post Jubilee. This would involve finding some common times when people prefer meetings and work, and documenting the key meetings that are actually part of the rhythm of the office. Agile standups, lunch breaks, Focus Fridays, and periodic all-in meetings would get written down, but not scheduled.

Then, everyone would simultaneously wipe their entire calendars clean. In this moment, everyone would regain a fully blank 40 hour work week while while simultaneously eliminating the rat’s nest of meeting dependencies.

Next, there would be a brief party to enjoy those few moments of genuinely blank calendar bliss. Cake and ice cream would be made available along with small triangle sandwiches and perhaps plates of shrimp, budget permitting.⁵

Finally, everyone would be free to plug back in important meetings in a strategic and coordinated way. My recommendation:

1. Create sets of work blocks and meeting blocks, perhaps alternating four-hour chunks on Monday through Thursday. This way, morning people and afternoon people would each have two days of solid head-down time, in which to accomplish deep work.
   
2. Fridays, would be left blank as “Focus Fridays” to give people a full day away from meetings, and have some space for longer, strategic meetings and confabs.

Outcomes

Reactions

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References

Wikipedia
The Conversation