Less is more
Why we need more while we can do less but better?
Less meeting
Less features
Less people
…Less anything
I love the “Less is more” principle. Why we need more while we can do less but better?
Less meeting
In a company, Less meeting means we will save everyone’s time and save the company money. I don’t hate the meetings, I love effective meetings. An effective meeting where:
- It’s urgent or a sprint/milestone meeting. We only hold the meeting as little as possible.
- We don’t have more than 5 people at the meeting.
- We have a clear agenda
- Provide pre-meeting documents where everyone can read before.
- Not over 30 minutes.
- End of the meetings, we must have clear actions.
I can explain how bad is the non-effective meeting can affect employee productivity and also their minds:
- Let’s say a day you have 5,6 meetings. You work on task A in 30 minutes => have a meeting => You work on task B in 45 minutes => have a meeting => ….=> TERRIBLE DAY. You can’t focus on your works, can’t make anything done.
- For a long time, it will affect your brain and you can’t focus on anything for more than 1 hour. The problem happened to me.
- Many times, you have to join the 45-minute meeting but don’t talk much. So what is the problem? Actually, you don’t need to join that meeting because on your side, your time is a waste and you don’t have any idea where you’re on. So you should say NO to the meeting which doesn’t need you much.
- Everyone loves “Jump on the call”??? Why do we need to jump on a call where you can write it down in just 1 sentence? Make a call for someone that means you will interrupt him on other things. Writing is better for explaining a complex idea. We will discuss later how can send a better chat message on another topic. So we only jump on a call if it’s really necessary.
Less features
If your company is small (< 20 people), your abilities are very limited. But when we compare our product with the competitors or when we get feedback from users, we always want to do more. So those sides are in conflict.
So we should do less but smarter. Doing less means we will save our development time, reduce the bugs and the important thing is we can focus on a few things but can do it in world-class and be the best.
It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t get feedback from the users or we don’t research about our competitors. We still do those things but we should say NO to most of the new features if they don’t follow our principle.
Less people
We will say WOW when we see a company with hundreds, thousands of employees. But I don’t imagine why we need too many people. We shouldn’t focus on the quantity for hiring, we should focus on the quality only and pay the top salary in the market.
We say that we will focus on a few features but do it well and be the best. So that means we only can achieve that if we have smart people.
…Less anything
Let’s think about how to do less in anything, it will save our money, our time and make the company profitable.
This principle can apply to our life as well. It will help you to focus on the quality of your life and spend more time with the family.
