On the heels of last week’s post about how to run a startup board meeting, I attended a speaker event last week at the West Side YMCA in New York and the guest speaker was Jason Fried, author of REWORK and founder of 37Signals. One of the chapters in his book and topics that night was about how “meetings are toxic” and can be totally eliminated from a company.  I couldn’t agree more with the former, but have been thinking about the plausibility of the later ever since.

Unfortunately, “meeting-creep” is all too common as a company grows in size. At first, you have weekly meetings, then daily meetings, then quarterly meetings and finally, the semi-annual and/or annual meetings.  You have meetings of all varieties: one-on-one meetings, product meetings, strategy meetings, team meetings, meetings to coordinate all the meetings, etc and so forth. Before you know it half of your company is in meetings at any given time, which inevitable requires lots of senior management’s time to manage the meetings, or just attend the meetings “out of respect” for the employee hosting the meeting, which only makes the meeting seem that much more important or necessary to attend. It’s a vicious cycle my friends!

Here are the top two reasons I think meetings are toxic:

1. Productivity & Opportunity Cost – What could have those people been doing instead if they had been left to focus for that hour on big projects? Most topics discussed in meetings either could have been done via email or some other form of communication and/or didn’t need that many people even if an in-person pow-wow was necessary.
2. Expense – If there are 10 people in a meeting for an hour and the average salary of each person is $150,000 that meeting is costing over $720 per hour, not including benefits, which would tac on another 20% for a whopping $865 per hour.

So here are the top 5 ways I plan to reduce or eliminate meetings at my new company:

1. Standing Room Only – When New York’s own Mayor Michael Bloomberg was building Bloomberg, what is easily one of the largest, most successful technology company started in New York, he had a policy of taking all chairs out of the conference rooms. He found that when everyone is forced to stand up at every meeting the average meeting time went from one hour to 15 minutes or less.  When I build my first conference room it will have a table that is just high enough to take notes and zero chairs.
2. Optional Attendance – Jason mentioned a 5000+ person company (size doesn’t matter) who’s CEO has made all company meetings optional, including his own. He leaves it up to his trusted employees to decide for themselves is there is something more valuable they could be doing. I personally love this idea!  This forces meeting organizers to have to sell others on attending their meeting, which in turn forces them to really think hard if the meeting is valuable enough to spend the time convincing others to come or if it could be done another way or just not done at all.
3. Strict Start & Stop Times - The only thing worse than the people who schedule lots of meeting is the people who come late and make everyone else wait for them. These people are making the statement that whatever they were doing was more important than the pressing things the collective group has to do.   I am a big fan of starting exactly on time and locking the door on everyone, including the CEO, who is late. It is also crucial that you stop strictly on time, as then others will learn there is absolutely no spare time at the end so if they want to get their point across they better do it in the time allotted. Frankly, the people that are late probably don’t think the meeting is worth their time anyway and you will be doing them a favor by locking them out. Your new motto should be “lock’em out and throw’em out!”
4. Alternative Collaboration Tools – If meetings are all about communications and collaboration then use one of the many collaborate tools available that enable people to work on projects together real time, including Campfire,  Google Docs, the newly minted Chatter by Salesforce.com and the list goes on and on.
5. Just Say No! - Eliminate Meetings altogether as a rule. Do you have the guts to do it? 37Signals did and they are doing just find without them.

If you are at a startup, or any company for that matter, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that more and more meetings are “normal” as  you grow.  Normal is what YOU make it! If you decide that no meetings is normal than, voila!, it’s normal!  Don’t be a sheep, and for God’s sake don’t follow the sheep to slaughter.

Companies are filled with people that have nothing to do but fill their day with meaningless meetings.  It makes them feel as though they are accomplishing something.  The problem is that there are other employees that need to actually get work done.  If you are amongst the later don’t let the former drag you down or make you go home or work nights and weekends to “get real work done.”  You have a choice, even if that choice is to quit the company your working for to join one where you can be more productive, like mine:-)!

It’s been one full week since I left my last company to launch SalesCrunch, a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) company who’s mission is to  revolutionize the sales profession and make sales sexy through technology and education.

No matter how great your idea or how much funding you have, the clock is always against you in a startup. That is true when you are two guys in a garage and its even more true when you are 100 people and your monthly nut is in the millions, especially if you are not yet profitable.  So, you need to get a lot done in a very short time with limited resources at just about every stage of growth.  While I am always looking for ways to be more productive, frankly I have been running on a startup clock for so many years I get more stuff done in a day than most people get done in a week or even two.   My biggest problem is making sure I stop to take measure and smell the roses every once in a while.

So when I thought about all that I have accomplished in one short week, I had to share.  Below is a list of just the biggest accomplishments. I elaborated on a few in more detail below and, since finalizing the logo was one of the accomplishments this week, I am using this post to update the one I did earlier this week “What Not To Say To Your Logo Designer.”

Top Accomplishments of the Week:

• Finished 90% of the business plan
• Got verbal commitments for $250,000 from a few angel investors
• Scheduled several more investor meetings for the coming weeks
• Designed the logo and business cards
• Setup up Microsoft Exchange Server
• Secured an office in TechSpace in Union Square, New York
• Hired a kick-ass Director of Engineering – now I can say “we” instead of “me”
• Setup a basic “about us” website
• Met Marc Benioff in person. Marc is the Founder & CEO of Salesforce.com, on top of which we are building our technology platform.

The Logo:

What’s Behind a Name?

1. More Revenue. Less Time. – One of our goals is to empower sales professionals, and therefore the companies for which they work, with the ability to create more revenue (Sales) with less time and resources (Crunch) through education and technology.
2. Bite-Sized Learning – The word “Crunch” is symbolic of a much bigger philosophy we have about how people learn.  One of the biggest problems in sales today is that professional training is so expensive it is often done in marathon sessions that last days or weeks.  Unfortunately, people quickly become overwhelmed and forget most of what learned within days. However, retention increases 2-5 times over classroom training when information is “crunched” into “bite-sized” increments and when they can control the time, place and pace of their training.

What’s With The Rhino?

1. Unstoppable Power & Endurance -  Rhino’s can charge at up to 35 miles an hour. Weighing in at between 1 and 10 tons (2,000-10,000 lbs), experts agree that you can’t stop them or charge their course, so its best to just get out of their way. Despite being hunted near extinction for their horns, Rhinos date back 20M years.  When singularly focused, good sales people are similarly unstoppable and very hard to kill off!
2. Thick-Skinned – Rhino’s have a thick protective skin made of layers of collagen.  Facing constant rejection day in and day out, sales people need to be very thick skinned above all.
3. Crunch-ability - Rhino’s can crunch a small car underfoot.  There are also legends about rhinoceros stamping out fire in Malaysia, India and Burma.  Sales people are put under constant strain to “crush” their sales goals.

The Office:

The gang in our new downtown office. From left to right: Founder & CEO Sean Black, Director of Engineering David Sommers, and fellow entrepreneur in arms Eloise Bune of Gracious Eloise.

Unfortunately, I am easily distracted by nature. I have worked really hard over the years to find sustainable work habits that keep me focused and increasingly more productive.  I have tried many productivity systems (time management is an oxymoron) and finally found one that works at few years ago in Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen.  But what I have found is that it doesn’t matter how good your system if you can’t manage the inevitably distracting work environment you are in.

I was reminded of this reading the new book “Rework” last night. They have a chapter on productivity and a section called “Interruption is the enemy of productivity” with which I couldn’t agree more.  They stress that interruptions break your day into a series of moments. You work for half an hour and then someone taps you on the shoulder to ask a question. Twenty more minutes and the phone rings. Forty more minutes and a meeting starts, etc. You can’t get into a zone if you are constantly being interrupted.

As recently as four or five years ago, I remember aspiring to be a crack multitasker. If I could only do five things at once like some of these people I read about I could get so much done. In the midst of it all I remember desperately wondering why I was getting lots of things started and nothing accomplished.  Then I read a study about how, unless your a computer, multitasking is a complete crock of shit.  The study found that it takes someone at least 10 minutes to get fully immersed in the task at hand. So if you are constantly switching from one thing to another you are never really in the zone. Well the same goes for getting constantly interrupted.

When I started our New York office for Trulia in 2005 we only had three people in it. I quickly saw the tendency for us to turn to each other constantly asking questions, thinking out loud, blurting out ideas, etc.  At first I wanted to encourage a collaborate  environment and I thought letting that happen was a way to get it.  I quickly learned that I couldn’t get anything done being constantly interrupted.  Alot of times people were asking each other for things that they could easily find by Googling it. I started parroting my mom saying “look with your eyes, not with your mouth.”   That worked a little, but I had to stop the madness so I create a rule called “Top-of-the-Hour” or “Open Mic”.

I talked about this previously in my post about open work spaces, but here’s how it works:

Top-of-the-Hour Explained:

Only at the top of every hour are people free to take the floor to ask questions, make requests, tell jokes, talk about their weekend plans, and otherwise distract their co-workers.  This simple rule increased productivity in three major ways:

• Enables people to work uninterrupted for large chunks of time.
• Gives peeps a nice way to blow people off who interrupted them by simply saying “can this wait till top of the hour?” It also gave everyone permission to interrupt others once an hour.
• Forces peeps to batch all their questions, problems, issues etc to be discussed at the top of every hour instead of interrupting people multiple times per hour. In many cases, people answer their own questions within the hour.

There was some resistance to open mic  at first.  It was even the butt of a few jokes in our West Coast office, but it became popular pretty quickly as everyone’s workload and stress level increased and they too found the environment around them pretty unproductive.  Now it’s the cardinal rule.

There are two other things that we as a company have done that has been very effective as getting large blocks of uninterrupted time:

1. We put headphones on.  There is an unspoken privacy bubble when someone has headphones on that, at the very least, makes people think before interrupting.
2. We hide in a conference room or cafe and shut off all communication devices for a few hours.

If you have found better ways to work uninterrupted for hours or have tried some of the above let us know in the comments section.

I personally find open work spaces incredibly distracting, and therefore a very serious potential hindrance to productivity.

As you can see from the photo above, we embraced the open floor plan from day one at Trulia and now have over 90 people in our San Francisco office sitting in 12,000 square feet of open space. We have another 15-20 people in our downtown New York office sitting in a space that is a combination of an open bullpen and a handful of private offices that seat two or three people each.  I am based in New York, but have spent a week out of every four to six in our San Francisco office for the past four years. While both offices are open environments the culture of distraction at each is very different, mostly due to a “Top-of-the-Hour” policy I instituted in our NYC office when I first opened it in 2006. Before I explain, let’s explore the pros and cons of open work spaces:

Theoretical Pros of Open Work Spaces:

• Increased employee communication.
• Rapid exchange of knowledge and information.
• Employee equality – in most open environments everyone, including senior management, sit together out on the main floor, creating a sense of equality through a lack of private offices, especially the fancy corner kind.
• Easy access to team members and managers.
• Less opportunity for slacking, personal phone calls and/or surfing the web.
• Let’s face it, cubicles suck!
• Open space looks really cool and are most associated with the edgy, forward thinking companies, which help drawl a stark contrast between startups and corporate doldrums and make it easier to recruit talent.
• Open spaces are more flexible, so as you grow you can easily move furniture around freely without walls getting in the way.

Cons (aka realities) of Open Work Spaces:

• Lack of concentration and focus as a result of constant interruption by your coworkers – I read a study about why multitasking doesn’t work and one of the main tenants of the study is that it takes us 10 full minutes to really focus on what we’re doing and get into a productive zone.  So the more you get interrupted the less likely you will be to ever become truly productive.
• Socialization instead of collaboration – most of the increased communication resulting from open spaces is really just socialization.  While I am all for bonding and team building to increase productivity, a centralized common kitchen will do the trick. There is no need for an all day buffet of social opportunity.
• I have heard several people say they need to go home to “get real work done.” Need I say more?
• Lack of privacy – try getting a major confidential deal done by whispering your way though it, let alone deal with your mother-in-law!
• Unavailable conference rooms – when people can’t get work done or even get a little privacy at their desk they tend to go in search of private space, which fills conference rooms with singles.  I find this especially ironic when this happens to “green” companies that actively promote car pooling.
• Contempt – engineers and product people tend to breed contempt for sales and other people who use the phone alot, which is inevitably a major distraction and annoyance for them.  The easy answer is to separate the two groups onto separate open floors, but the danger is creating and/or managing two separate cultures.

Top-of-the-Hour:

The way I countered the above pitfalls in our New York office was with the simple rule I called  “Top-of-the-Hour” or “Open-mic”:  Only at the top of every hour are people free to take the floor to ask questions, make requests, tell jokes, talk about their weekend plans, and otherwise distract their co-workers.  This simple rule increased productivity in three major ways:

1. Enables people to work uninterrupted for large chunks of time.
2. Gives peeps a nice way to blow people off who interrupted them by simply saying “can this wait till top of the hour?” It also gave everyone permission to interrupt others once an hour.
3. Forces peeps to batch all their questions, problems, issues etc to be discussed at the top of every hour instead of interrupting people multiple times per hour. In many cases, people answer their own questions within the hour.

While this rule helped significantly, I would still do it differently next time and find a way to get all the theoretical benefits of an open work environment while avoiding all the harsh realities.

I also found a way to be productive when I visit the San Francisco office, but I don’t know how applicable it is for you unless you too are bi-coastal. In the first year I would simply find a quite room in the back and hide in there to do work. But as we got bigger I realized that my time in the SF office was a big opportunity to sync with my left coast colleagues from whom I was otherwise 3000 miles away. So when in SF now I simply work quietly from my hotel from 6-9am and then head into the office, where I have scheduled several meetings to push initiatives forward.  I also make it a point to spend time socializing in the kitchen, taking people out for coffee, lunch, drinks, etc.  I find this system to be extremely effective and productive for me, as I build deeper, personal relationships that really grease the tracks for productivity as we collaborate on the phone everyday once I leave. I just hope I don’t add to everyone’s distraction levels during the times I am in SF, or at least hope their productivity on projects we are working together goes up significantly enough to make it worth it for everyone.

I would love to hear other alternatives to or variations of open work space environment, so please feel free to talk about your ideas, experiences, etc in the comments section.