"Almost no meetings: “deep focus” - building instead of talking about building"

I used to work in an environment with often 8 hours of meetings straight. People had their headsets on while being in meetings and were simultaneously programming and when they heard their name mentioned they tried to say something smart. It was a terribly inefficient way to work.

Then I switched to an environment where we took "Almost no meetings" seriously and it was a tremendous boost. After a year or so I realized that we left a lot of potential efficiency untapped because of lack of communication or miss-communication.

Now I think there must be a middle ground - an optimum of communication for an optimum of efficiency. Teams need to be actively steered to that, just hiring good communicators and hoping for the best is probably not going to work. You need meetings. At least some. And some seemingly inefficient meetings will prevent inefficiency elsewhere.

Everything I wrote above was about highly distributed teams working remotely. The Tiny Teams Playbook has also

"In Person: either have an office, or VERY frequent AirBnB hack weeks"

in it, which changes things quite a bit.

That middle ground for me is what I like to call "proposal driven development".

Ideas, concepts, implementation plans are first written down as a proposal, which is read by others and discussed online. Meetings are only required if there are blockers to resolve, or differences in opinion.