Save Yourself 100 Hours a Year
Everyone “hates” meetings. Which means everyone is taking the same copout.
Hating meetings isn’t a position. It’s a way to complain about a problem while but not taking accountability for fixing it. And if you keep doing something that isn’t working, you’re accountable for that too.
So let’s start somewhere less imposing than your team’s calendar. Let’s start with yours.
Open it and count the recurring meetings. Now count how many of them you created.
That’s the part complaining leaves out. The meetings didn’t arrive by accident because somebody scheduled them. And a surprising number of times, that somebody was you, because you weren’t sure what to do next.
Which is what a meeting usually is: the default response to uncertainty. Not sure what to do? Schedule a meeting. Need buy-in? Meeting. Something went wrong? Meeting. They feel like work, they’re rarely questioned, and they take 30 seconds to create.
Here’s the arithmetic you already know and you’ve heard the joke about it. An hour with eight people isn’t an hour, it’s a day.
You know this. Everyone knows this. And yet, your calendar stays full.
Why meetings multiply:
Meetings are the default response to uncertainty. When you’re not sure what to do, you schedule a meeting. When you need buy-in, you schedule a meeting. When something went wrong, you schedule a meeting. Meetings feel like work. They’re rarely questioned. And they’re easy to create.
The meeting audit:
Look at your recurring meetings. For each one, ask:
- What decisions have I made here? If the answer is none, I’ve been running an update meeting that could be async.
- Who actually needs to be here and who am I keeping in the room because removing them would be awkward?
- Does this need to happen at this frequency, or did I set it weekly and never revisit it?
- What would break if I canceled this?
Meetings types and how to reframe them.
Communication - you’re having this meeting like you would in front of a group of people. The intent is to inform them of something. You’re not deciding anything. There may be Q&A depending on the type of group you’re meeting with, but that’s not a decision forum.
Decision forum - the intent is to make a decision. If you get to the end of the meeting without making the decision, you failed twice. You’ve failed once because you didn’t get the decision made in this meeting. And you failed twice, because you’re likely going to end up in another meeting to make the decision.
Status forum - If you’re only discussing status, then these should be decision forums or an email. They’re decision forums if you’re deciding what to do based on the status of a project, issue, concern. If that’s what you’re trying to achieve, then you should send an email ahead of time.
Missing agendas - Another sign that the meeting is going to be suspect is the lack of an agenda. The agenda can be as simple as “here’s three outstanding questions and what we need to decide.”
The reason you won’t do any of this
You already knew most of the above. So does everyone who’s ever complained about a calendar. Knowing isn’t the problem.
The problem is that canceling a meeting is a social act. Telling a peer their status call should be an email tells them their meeting was worth attending. Removing someone from an invite tells them they weren’t needed and they may feel left out or take offense at it.
That’s the real cost, and it’s why your calendar stays full while you complain about it. So here are the words.
To a peer: “Can we try this as an email for a month? If we lose something, we can put it back.”
To someone you’re removing: say it before they notice the missing invite. “I’m cutting this down to the people who are directly involved. I’ll send you the notes after, and if you want back in, say so and you’re back in.”
None of those are clever and that’s the point. The reason these conversations don’t happen is because you’re worried about the fallout.
The experiment:
Cancel one recurring meeting this week. Just one. See what happens. Most of the time, nothing breaks and everyone gets an hour back.
See you next week!
-Frank
