In the early Nugget days, I loved to read the reformist business missives of the Basecamp founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Of their many hardline, caustic stances, few resonated more with me than their hatred of meetings.
I vowed to myself that we would never, no matter how big or bustling Nugget ever got, have people in meetings all day long. Wasteful, meaningless, inefficient — honestly, downright evil — meetings. That was a few years ago.
Today, I was in meetings almost the entire day. I hopped from one zoom to the next, in an almost never-ending stream of conversations that surely resembled Fried’s, and many people’s, idea of workplace hell. And it wasn’t just me. In between two calls, a colleague who I was about to meet with said, “is there anything I need to have prepped? … have been in non-stop meetings :|”. She had been in and out of meetings all morning, and had another one coming up with me.
At these utterly mundane workplace words, I suddenly felt all other thoughts, everything previously on my mind, drift away. I started typing a response, and then decided to keep it to myself instead. What I had wanted to write was: “At Nugget? At little old Nugget?”
The feeling wasn’t necessarily pride or joy, but it wasn’t pure revulsion either. It was a weird, amorphous mix of the two, made only weirder by the fact that this bundle of emotions was about, well… meetings. On one hand, I was filled with the basic capitalistic, American sense of accomplishment in what we had done, the former closet operation now so large that someone might have two, four, five other people to coordinate with before a project goes out the door. A reminder that somehow, some way, over the past few years, we built a “real company” over here. I know, obviously, that a company being bigger doesn’t make it better, or more real. But it’s the sort of thing that feels good, even if a part of you thinks it shouldn’t.
Of course, there was also the feeling, from the part of my brain still loyal to the early gospel of Fried and Hansson, filled with mortal terror. The part leaving me thinking things like: “What the hell have you done?” “You’ve replicated the worst feature of corporate business culture,” and “Everyone at work 100% hates you and is making fun of your new haircut.”
Those fears, at least the first two, I think were overblown. The conversations that filled my day, as it turns out, were extremely pleasant and substantive. Never were more than four people present, and in the majority of my calls today, there were just two. Not only did we make decisions, but those decisions established building blocks for our structure and roles that I’m confident will make “actually getting things done” — Friend and Hansson’s North Star in their anti-meeting crusades — easier than ever before.
Back in 2018, or 2019, when I was having these thoughts about the type of business we’d create, there weren’t many meetings. I could go a whole day, and often did, without so much as speaking to anyone other than Hannah. There were designs to make, photos to take, a website to regularly update, and more. A lot got done. A whole heck of a lot didn’t. We didn’t have enough people. I couldn’t have had a morning of meetings if I’d wanted to.
That’s what a lot of my meetings were about today. People stuff. Human stuff, mushy stuff. The stuff that can feel like it’s not getting stuff done, even when secretly, it really is.
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll feel differently. My thoughts on this stuff can change from day to day. I’ll see you then — my zoom link is in the calendar invite.