Small teams, short meetings, long stretches of quiet
The best month of work I ever had involved four people, one standing agreement, and an almost aggressive amount of silence.
Mara Ellison
Writer and design lead
I have worked on teams of forty and teams of four. The teams of four were better, and for a long time I assumed the reason was talent. It was not. It was the number of conversations required before anything could happen.
Four people have six possible pairs. Forty people have seven hundred and eighty. Coordination is not a soft cost, it is the cost, and almost every process a growing company adds is an attempt to pay it without admitting it.
The standing agreement
The best month of work I remember came from a rule we set in about ten minutes and then never broke: anyone can decide anything reversible on their own. If undoing the decision would take less than a day, you did not need a meeting, a document, or permission. You needed to tell everyone afterwards.
It sounds reckless. In practice it moved perhaps two decisions a week out of a meeting and into someone's afternoon, and the handful we got wrong were, by definition, cheap to undo.
Meetings as a last resort
We kept two, and killed the rest.
- Twenty minutes on Monday, standing, to say what each of us was doing and what was in the way.
- An hour on Thursday, sitting, to look at real work on a real screen and be honest about it.
Everything else was written down. Written updates are slower to produce and dramatically faster to consume, and they have the useful side effect of exposing vague thinking, which a confident voice in a room can hide indefinitely.
Protect the quiet
The part people underestimate is the silence. Making something good requires holding a lot of context in your head at once, and that state takes roughly half an hour to reach and about four seconds to destroy.
A day with three meetings in it is not a day with five hours of work left. It is a day with three fragments.
So we defended mornings. No calls before noon, no expectation of an instant reply, and a shared understanding that a message sent at ten was being read at one. Nothing broke. Quite a lot got finished.
It does not scale, and that is fine
I am not claiming this survives a company of two hundred. I am claiming that most teams are far smaller than the process they have adopted, and that shedding it is usually available to them the moment somebody is willing to ask.
Written by
Mara Ellison
Writer and design lead
Mara has spent twelve years shaping products for small teams, mostly by asking slower questions than anyone wanted. She writes Fieldnotes on Sunday mornings, usually before the house wakes up.
