Calling a meeting to discuss something at work used to be the best way to get in front of the people you need to talk to. You’d send a few emails to ask them to meet, and arrange a time; or you’d go over to their desks in person. Then, you’d block off an hour to talk about the things on your list. The conversation would often get derailed onto a semi-related issue, and you’d all come out with a little less energy to face the rest of the day–and an hour behind.

Teams need to stay in touch and discuss the issues relevant to their work, without resorting to time-consuming meetings or easily-buried email threads. Flow users already know that you can create a task in our app that gives your discussion context, and then bring in the people who should be involved. The discussion can have a due date, and stakeholders can weigh in with their comments. Questions like “What do you think of my idea?” and “What should we do about that thing?” get addressed. As soon as it’s created, the conversation gets placed front and centre for your team members, when they’re readiest to think about it: at their desk and prepared for new work. And after the discussion, you can move on with the project or task without changing systems, letting everyone see its progress through to completion.

We’ve been talking to our customers about how they use Flow, and in a recent interview with Paul DeJoe, CEO of Ecquire, the topic of fewer meetings came up. His team has been using Flow for almost three years. They picked it up when the company was growing and they were finding they had many projects, ideas, and tasks to keep track of in many different places, and they needed a way to keep on top of things.

"It’s reduced the need for overhead costs and interruptions for our team. It’s so much easier to collaborate on ideas with the team with Flow when you can see they’re centered around an objective. We’ve found that one call per week was sufficient. Everything else was contained in Flow."

By turning meetings into asynchronous discussions, talk stays on topic, time and energy is saved, and no one gets interrupted. One other thing Paul had to add: “We don’t use email for internal conversations anymore. Flow allows us to do that.”