Rework

Each week, a small team added another meeting to stay aligned. One was for planning, one for updates, one for reviewing the plan, and one for preparing the report about the update. The calendar looked responsible. It also left little uninterrupted time for the product that had brought the team together.

No single meeting seemed wasteful. Each had been added for a reason: a missed detail, a request for visibility, an earlier confusion. Over time, the reasons accumulated into a system that treated coordination as the work itself.

One week, a team member asked a plain question: what would break if this meeting were half as long? The answer was not nothing. Some information would need a different home. A decision would need a clearer owner. But the question revealed that much of the meeting repeated what people already knew.

The team shortened it, wrote down the decisions that actually mattered, and used the recovered time on the work customers would see. The change did not make planning irrelevant. It made planning answerable to its purpose.

Rework argues for directness, restraint, and skepticism toward business rituals that grow faster than value. Its ideas are deliberately provocative, not universal laws. The useful invitation is to notice when a process exists mainly because it is expected, then ask whether removing part of it would make room for more consequential work.