5 Ways to Cut Your Online Meeting Time in Half

It sounds impossible, or too good to be true. But Kenzo Fong built his company, Rock, around this policy from day one. By his account, it's only paid off since.

We're drowning in meetings. Since the pandemic kicked off, millions of workers log on every morning and spend hour after hour stuck in back-to-back calls where no actual work gets done.

One recent survey found that a large share of people said meetings broke their focus and made them less productive overall. Zoom fatigue is wearing down our workforce. A Stanford study put it bluntly: too much close-up eye contact is intense, video chats carry a far heavier cognitive load, and watching yourself on camera in real time, all day long, is exhausting.

Good news: the fix is simple. Cancel most of your weekly meetings. Sounds reckless, I know. But companies have done exactly that, and they're thriving.

Big players like Uber and Google have people spread across the globe, and they often end up in online meetings all day, sometimes bleeding into personal time. Worse, most of those meetings are a rehash of things everyone already knows. They chop up the day and kill any real, focused work.

It gets uglier. People stretch meetings to fill the slot they were given, even when everything's been covered with time to spare. Thirty minutes, sixty, ninety. The clock fills no matter what.

That's why some companies made a point of sparing their teams from a day buried in unwieldy meetings. It isn't even practical to keep that up, especially when your team spans different countries and time zones. They broke free from the 9-to-5 grind of work-work-work.

Cancel almost every meeting on the calendar

Most video calls don't need to happen live. In fact, you can replace them with written updates and async tasks. Async work, in plain terms, is when people do their part on their own schedule. Teammates hand off tasks and set deadlines for each other without expecting an instant reply. Need to talk something through with a teammate? You can always set that up when you both have a minute.

Based on what's actually worked, here's how to think about clawing back the hours you're losing to meetings:

• Take inventory of every meeting on your calendar and kill every status-update one. There's no reason to hold three separate 30-minute "check-ins" week after week when a quick written update in a tool like Rock does everything a status meeting does.
• If you absolutely have to keep a weekly check-in, shrink it a little at a time. You'll be surprised how easy it is, and how little you miss these meetings once they're shorter or gone. Take a 60-minute meeting down to 30, then 15, and you'll land on a five-to-ten-minute touch base that nobody dreads anymore.
• Look at everything you cover in those meetings and ask how you'd communicate it without doing it live. You can share async video updates for people to watch later with a tool like Loom, or drop voice messages through Rock.
• Set up status updates through a tool like Rock. At the start of each week, team leads create topics or tasks for people to work on and post their progress against. Questions or roadblocks? Hash them out async.
• Save your face-to-face time for the conversations that really need it: brainstorms, one-on-ones, and the kind of work that just doesn't translate well to async.

Video-call fatigue is a real problem, and wasted meeting hours cost companies real money. A team of tired, burned-out, unproductive people is a team headed for trouble.

To actually win, we have to rethink how we spend our working hours and which methods get the most out of our productivity and our lives. Make these changes and you'll be amazed at what you and your team can pull off.