open · Meeting Management, Decision Making · 5–15 min · 1-10 people · low energy

Think Before You Sync

Before booking a meeting, the organiser runs five quick checks. Is it urgent? Is the goal to share information, or to decide, generate ideas or unblock? How many people need to be involved? Will one person do most of the talking? How complex is the topic? Depending on the answers, the topic goes to a meeting, an async update or recorded video, or a mix.

When to use Think Before You Sync

Use when calendars are full of meetings that could have been a message, and you want a simple rule people can apply on their own.

What it solves

Teams default to booking a meeting for everything, so there is no time left for focused work.

How to run Think Before You Sync, step by step

  1. Urgency: if it can wait, it does not need to interrupt anyone. Go async (1 min).
  2. Goal: information sharing goes async; generating ideas, deciding and unblocking may need a meeting (1 min).
  3. Size: keep live meetings under eight people; invite the rest to contribute through comments or video (1 min).
  4. Presenter: if one person will talk most of the time, record a video instead (1 min).
  5. Complexity: simple topics go async; complex topics get async prep plus a shorter meeting (1 min).
  6. Tell people what you decided and how they can take part, especially if you cancelled a meeting.

Materials needed

  • The five questions on a card or in a doc
  • An async tool for updates, such as a team channel or video messages

Facilitator tips

  • Run it as a team on all recurring meetings once, then let people use it alone.
  • Ask for feedback after a few weeks; some meetings will need to come back, and that is fine.
  • Combine sync and async: written prep makes the remaining meetings shorter.

Common pitfalls

  • Meetings are cancelled but no async alternative is set up, so information stops flowing.
  • Relationship-building meetings get cut because they fail the information test.

Running it online or hybrid

A checklist an organiser runs alone before booking a meeting, or that a team runs together on its recurring meetings using a shared doc.

What it produces

A decision per topic: meeting, async, or async prep plus a short meeting, with a note on how people can contribute.

Origin

A play from Atlassian's Team Playbook, built on Atlassian's Teamwork Lab research into replacing meetings with async work. — source

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