By: Nick Sonnenberg
Founder, Leverage
Last month, I had the honor of joining Kara Austin for the PMXPO Book club at the PMXPO Virtual Experience Series on March 23rd. I spoke about my book, Come Up for Air, and answered some questions around how teams can work together more efficiently. Here are a few questions posed during my presentation, with my best answers.
Question 1: I'm part of an organization that is very "meetings heavy" where meetings are often a free-for-all of people who don't need to be there. Do you have any advice as to how to gently influence change without people feeling resentful for being excluded?
This is a very common problem, and the solution is more of a mindset shift than anything—but I do have a few tactical suggestions as well. My first piece of advice is to simply educate your team on the value of their time and the cost of meetings.
Regardless of whether they're a salaried employee or paid by the hour, everyone has an effective hourly rate. So if you take the average hourly rate of people in a meeting and multiply it by the length, you can actually calculate the cost of a meeting. I'd suggest doing this as an exercise with your team to show them how much a typical meeting costs. It can be pretty eye-opening, as most people don't think this way and will be shocked by the cost of seemingly innocuous meetings.
Now, there are ultimately four ways to reduce the cost of a meeting. You can eliminate it, shorten it, reduce the number of people, or reduce its frequency (if it's a recurring meeting). Reducing the number of people is a very easy and impactful lever. Cutting out one person from an hour-long meeting, for example, could save you $50 to $100 depending on their rate. If that's a weekly meeting, you're looking at anywhere from $2500 to $5000 saved per year. And not only is it saving the company money, but it's giving that person more time to focus on important work.
So the first step is to just reinforce this concept and explain why limiting the number of people in a meeting is important. When you schedule a meeting, you should be thinking carefully about who actually needs to be there—especially for recurring meetings.
And then I have three other, more tactical suggestions. The first is that if someone is only relevant for a portion of the meeting, you can prioritize working through that part of the agenda first. They can then leave early and get back to their work.
The second is that anyone should feel comfortable leaving a meeting if they aren't contributing or feel they don't need to be there. This is a rule at my company and Elon Musk even has a similar rule in his companies. Sometimes people feel they'll get in trouble if they leave a meeting early, but it should really be the opposite.
And finally, remember that recordings and notes can be shared afterward. If someone doesn't have anything to contribute but should be kept in the loop, you can leave them off the calendar invite and send the notes or a recording afterward. Then, they can review that information and get up to speed at a time that's convenient for them. You can even sometimes use this strategy to eliminate meetings entirely.
Ultimately, this is all about protecting peoples' time. When you're in meetings all day, you don't have time for your most important work, and you're then forced to work late in order to get everything done. So I would make it clear that when you're limiting the number of people in a meeting, you're doing it to protect their time and ensure they don't get overloaded—not to exclude anyone.
Question 2: What tech systems are you all using for work management, comms, and SOPs?
Each of these categories you mention are part of the CPR Framework discussed in Come Up for Air, so I'll briefly go through each one and include the tools we use for each, along with some alternatives.
The "C" in CPR is for Communication, which is broken down into internal communication tools and email. The two primary internal communication tools on the market today are Slack and Microsoft Teams. Similarly, the two primary email tools are Gmail and Outlook. At my company Leverage, we use Slack and Gmail.These two software choices will depend largely on whether you're on the Microsoft Suite or not as they're very similar in functionality.
The "P" in CPR is for Planning, which involves work management tools. There are a lot of different work management tools out there nowadays, and at Leverage, use Asana. Some other options are Clickup, Jira, and Monday.com, just to name a few. These tools hold tasks and projects, with deadlines, assignees, statuses, and more—basically everything you need to get work done and monitor progress.
The "R" in CPR is all about documenting knowledge, and I recommend doing that through two types of tools—a knowledge base and a process management tool. Knowledge bases are for storing static knowledge like SOPs, policies, assets, and general information that doesn't change all that much. Process management tools are used to document how repeatable processes get done. At Leverage, we use Coda for our knowledge base and Process Street for our process management tool. Other options for knowledge bases are Notion, Guru, Confluence, Sharepoint, etc. And for process management tools, there's Pipefy, Trainual, Sweetprocess, and more.
The main lesson, however, is that individual software choices aren't the most critical part of the equation. I always say "it's not the tool, it's how you use it." It's about aligning as a team on when and how to use each of these tools together.
So, at a high level, here's how to think about using each of these tools within the CPR Framework:
- Email should be used for external communication only (with people outside of your organization—partners, vendors, customers, etc.)
- Your internal communication tool should be used for internal communication only (with your team and people in your organization)
- Your work management tool should hold all action items and any communication related to work being done now or in the future
- Your knowledge base should store static information and FAQs (think: Who? What? Where? When? Why?)
- Your process management tool should hold all the repeatable processes that keep the business running.
Question 3: Suggestions for how to get to inbox zero?
Getting to Inbox Zero is a real game changer—we're typically able to save our clients an average of 5 hours per person per week just by getting everyone to Inbox Zero. And if you're thinking this won't work for you because you have 10,000 or more emails in your inbox, think again.
The first step is to limit the number of emails coming into your inbox in the first place. I won't get into all the specifics here, but there are a number of settings in both Gmail and Outlook to move promotional emails to other inboxes, filter spam messages, and prioritize emails from real people. If you're really serious, you can even set up a rule to filter out any email that has the word "unsubscribe" in it so you don't get any marketing emails.
Next is what we call "ripping the band-aid off." Most people have thousands of read and unread emails in their inbox, so the idea of getting to zero seems pretty far-fetched. Well, the reality is that most of those emails are probably old and irrelevant anyway. So I recommend just archiving all emails older than 30 days. This lets you wipe the slate clean so you can make some real progress, but you'll still be able to access those emails at any time in your archive.
And finally, you can use what I call the R.A.D. System to work through each email. R.A.D. stands for reply, archive, and defer. These are the three (and only three) actions you can take with an email in your inbox.
- R: If an email warrants a reply, reply to it (then archive).
- A: If an email is irrelevant or doesn't necessitate a reply, archive it.
- D: If an email is not relevant now but will be later, defer it.
Deferring is a very important yet underutilized method. Most email tools have some method of "snoozing" an email, where it will disappear from your inbox and reappear at a specified date. This is wildly helpful. If you're busy one day and would rather get to an email later in the week, you can simply snooze it to that day and it will reappear. Similarly, if you send an email and want to be reminded to follow up if they don't respond, you can snooze it to the exact date you'd like to be notified.
If you use the R.A.D. System, you can efficiently work through every email in your inbox until there's nothing left. Although, I always say that maintaining zero emails is a bit unrealistic. Really, if you're keeping it under 20 you should feel good—it doesn't make sense to ruthlessly adhere to a clean inbox, since your time and attention are surely needed elsewhere!
If you’d like to watch the presentation, it is available on demand through 31 January 2024 at no cost. Visit the PMI Virtual Experience Series for more details.
