Why don’t we organize any meetings on Monday & Friday?

The cover image is actually a screenshot from our playbook in which we try to explain what it is like working with us, SHERPA. But before coming to “no meeting days”, we’d first like to focus on the base idea here: the culture that cultivates such rigid standards.

In SHERPA, we believe in productivity as if we believe in anything else – that’s why we build systems of effective working and challenge our frameworks every other day to make them even more optimized.

We build and document standards for each step of any process even if we think that we already know how to run it very well. That’s because of three reasons mainly:

1. When we start to write down a standards doc (simply explaining what we propose to do, why & when we do it, and what the side effects are, etc), we may notice some open issues that need to be addressed to set the standard right.
2. Some other SHERPA (a newcomer for instance) might not know the process as we do and a structured document could turn out be a guide to her when she needs it.
3. The palest ink is stronger than the sharpest memory. When we write things down, it instantly becomes official and we feel a strong will to apply that standard in the right place & time.

Now, you know why we set these kinds of standards and mention them everywhere.

So, you may still have this question on your mind: Why Monday & Friday are our no meeting days? In a world of meetings that run businesses, does this sound a little bit bold to you?

Think again. 

• How many times did you tell yourself or your colleagues that you cannot do business (produce anything) because of running from meeting to meeting?

• How many times did you survive a meeting that should have been an email?

• How many times did you find yourself in a meeting that you have nothing to say and question your existence in it (and in life as a whole)?

Let’s be honest.

Don’t you also think that you can get rid of some of the meetings in your calendar? What is the harm if you participate in fewer meetings in a week? 

In fact, we are not against meetings. We just think we can optimize them.

To us, meetings should have a well-defined purpose (agenda & objective), should be conducted with a sufficient number of people (participants) and shouldn’t last more than 40-60 minutes.

And another standard to add these rules is that we do not organize any meetings on Mondays and Fridays just to focus on production & internal sprint planning, just to make sure the meetings we run on the other days to be well-prepared and worth to spend time for every participant. 

Since we work with the “Design as a Service (DaaS)” principles, we allocate every project a certain amount of person/hours and at the end of each month, we provide highly detailed timesheets (based on person/task/minute spent). We respect the time of our project owners as much as we take responsibility for the efficiency of a project. This is also another reason why we want to optimize meetings.

After all of these, needless to say, “no meeting days” rule is not an arbitrary one but a SHERPA way of working to serve better, to let our project owners get the most of it with the expected quality. 

Do you still think that you should definitely run your next meeting today? If you say no, just drop us a line to work with a partner who takes the utmost care of your resources.