Note from cryptodrftng: here’s a good tool for checking availability - When2Meet. It doesn’t require registration.

Author: Antoine Sakho

Source: TwoPlusDAO

I’ve noticed that people in various DAOs are wasting a criminal amount of time in useless meetings. This is freaking me out. A lot of faffing around, little gets done and much time gets wasted.

We can do better. Here is a WIP list of meeting “best practices” that have served me well over the years — also very much inspired by this great post:

Meetings That Don't Suck | Ken Norton

Contributor meetings at TwoPlus

• 💚 Consider starting meetings with a check-in and end them with a check-out
• 🙋🏾 Every “work” meeting should have an owner, an agenda, a target outcome and some action items by the end with assigned owners and dates
  • Because running the meeting and facilitating conversations needs full attention, where possible meetings should have a “leader” (facilitating) and a “scribe” (taking notes)
  • Of course, we should encourage “non-work” meetings, where people can just hang out, socialize and throw ideas in the air (i.e. Index Coop’s Tea Time). It just helps to separate concerns by being clear about which is which.
• 🛠️ Ideally, meetings are either “decision meetings” or workshops.
  • I like deep work’s approach: Deep Work maximises productivity by running workshops instead of meetings. As soon as a task requires more than 2 individuals, we run a structured workshop. If a 1:1 conversation takes too long in chat, we jump on a video call right away.
• 📨 Stay clear from “weekly status updates” as much as possible (email or Discord works very well for that)
  • The most vile creature on any calendar is the weekly status or “check-in” meeting. You know: “Let’s go around the table and have everyone give an update.” They’re a waste of time and harken to a bygone era where managers used them to make sure people were doing work.
• ⏱️ Meetings should start on time and end on time. If we finish before, great! — you get some of your life back.
• 🧘🏾‍♂️ Keep meetings small (<5)
  • Fewer than five people in one meeting is ideal, and research has shown that effectiveness drops when more than seven people are in the room. Teams should send representatives rather than the entire group. If you can’t figure out how to hold the meeting with a smaller group, rethink your goals or divide and conquer.
• 🤏🏾 Keep meetings short - 30 mins ideally, perhaps 45 min.
  • Anything longer is by definition a workshop, and needs structured activities and facilitation, as well as careful (and collaborative) planning
  • Be considerate of how much time you’re taking from your team. Borrowing an hour of somebody’s time is the same as borrowing a neighbor’s ladder. Ask politely, keep it only as long as you need it, return it quickly and say ‘thank you’. Try never to schedule a meeting longer than 60 minutes, and aim for 30 minutes as a default. You’ll be surprised how much you can accomplish.
• ✍🏾 Document meetings to build knowledge over time and screen record them for contributors to catch up later if they couldn’t.
• 🤔 Consider the opportunity cost of every meeting
  • How much will this meeting cost your DAO? For example, a two-hour meeting with 16 attendees is 32 person-hours. That’s almost an entire person-week of time