In 2020, I presented a talk at FrOSCon titled No, we won’t have a video call for that: Communications for distributed teams. In early 2021 I put together a full-length writeup of that talk, and published it here. And for no apparent reason that article then made it to the top of Hacker News on one day in September 2021,1 and apparently resonated with quite a few people.

And after that, I got a fair number of questions along the lines of “okay, what you talk about is a spot-on description of how I want to work, but how do I get there?” In other words, what can you do in order to transition from a team that’s stuck in meeting hell, to one that actually goes fully distributed and embraces asynchronous communications?

Note: I use the shorthand Meeting Hell for a situation in which people are forced to
be in unnecessary and unproductive video meetings2 for an unhealthy fraction of
their work time.

This is admittedly a mere symptom of not having adopted asynchronous and
distributed ways of working, but it’s such a tell-tale sign thereof that it counts as a
dead giveaway. Thus, I think it’s okay to say “I’m stuck in meeting hell” when what
someone means is really “I work in an organization that’s failing badly at
distributed and asynchronous work.”