Recurring meetings are usually meetings looking for an agenda. Not the other way around. You’ll do well to delete most of them.

It’s a good practice to keep at least half the days of your team calendar meeting free. This meeting free half should also sync with your personal calendar.

If you reduce unnecessary meetings, you can use the time savings to build relationships with your team mates.

To ensure that the meetings you actually have are productive, here are a few simple things you can do.

Most “quick syncs” can be async. This honours everyone’s need for flow and deep work.

The ConveRel quadrants are a way for you to triage your meetings and figure out which ones can immediately or eventually be async.

Clear up one day each week, so it’s meeting free.

Compose your thought but schedule the message to go out when you expect the recipient(s) to be at work.

Block out focus time on your calendar so people know exactly when you are available.

Don’t pressure people or get pressured into responding to an email the moment they/you see it.

Set up your default status in a way that everyone knows you use the platform in an asynchronous manner.

Plan your week in advance, ration the distractions and use an app blocker to reap all the benefits of async work.

Think retro as a process that has two parts - take inputs asynchronously and run it synchronously.

Switch from fragile, redundant, ephemeral conversations to shared, persistent onboarding assets.

Pull requests are a feature that most source control systems provide (GitLab calls it a “merge request (MR)”). This feature allows anyone who wants to contribute code to a project, to package their changes so someone else can review their code before merging it into the codebase.

By documenting every business decision you make for your project, you help your present and future colleagues understand the rationale of why things are a certain way for your team.

Effective commit messages are a way for developers to communicate to each other about the changes they’re making to a codebase. These messages can be useful when fixing issues or when finding the root cause of a bug or even when troubleshooting a broken build.

Your architecture will change with time and in the future you may have to investigate why your architecture is a certain way. Architectural decision records (ADRs) help by providing an archaeology of your project.

By going async, you’ll limit the number of meetings you have. For the meetings you keep, you must afford your teammates, present and future, the courtesy of a meeting summary; a.k.a meeting minutes.

Let’s be honest. Teams don’t always have something big to showcase every sprint. Without substantive demos, the sprint reviews become a formality and a reporting exercise. Take a pragmatic approach to sprint reviews instead.