How to avoid all-day meetings with random participants and no agenda

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Jason Fried was well prepared. He had led Basecamp, the company he co-founded in 1999, in a remote-only fashion for decades. Together with his co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson, he had also written three bestselling books about collaboration in the digital era.

In a great article on the topic, he summarized his take on tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams: “Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda”.

That statement is somewhat surprising given what Fried’s company does. As early as 2006, Basecamp launched Campfire – the first modern SaaS group chat and messaging tool for business.

In the ten years after the launch, Fried and his co-workers sent each other nearly 10 million lines of messages. Based on that experience, he advocates using group chat sparingly in only a few, very specific situations – instead of having it as the primary, default method of communication. The way in which Basecamp employees use group chat comes down to a simple rule of thumb: “Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time”. I’ve distilled Fried’s advice on applying that rule into a few simple tips.

First, have your group chat client turned off by default. According to Fried, “interruptions are the enemy of productivity, and group chat has become the greatest interruption factory at work.” As with email, having group chat notifications coming at you every other minute will destroy your ability to approach your day deliberately and accomplish what matters to you.

Second, turn it on by schedule. Fried says that “all sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time”. To avoid that, use group chat only during specific, predefined times during the day.

Third, batch it. Comparing group chat to a sauna, Fried recommends to “stay a while but then get out […]” as it “feels good for a while, but it’s unhealthy to stay too long”. Accordingly, batch group chat and email together in bouts of asynchronous collaboration. And since we can stay focused for some 90 minutes at a time, don’t forget to include 7 to 20 minutes of defocus after that.

Pro tip: As with email, one of the most effective things we can do to limit disruptions from group chat takes only ten seconds. You might have guessed it already: Delete the group chat app on your phone. The reason is simple: None of the tips mentioned above work if you get ringed, pinged and dinged by your phone all day long.

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Until next week,Christian