My team decided to do a meetings purge this week. We went on a rampage, cancelling hours of recurring meetings from our calendars. It felt great. It also got me thinking: Why do we hate our meetings so much? Why do we bemoan the fact that we don’t have time for lunch, because we have 8 back-to-back meetings?
I don’t think it’s the number of meetings that’s the problem. Think about a senior executive that you admire and respect. They probably spend 90% of their day in meetings, but no one can say that they’re wasting their time. No, instead, I think the problem lies in HOW we run our meetings.
Why Our Meetings Suck
Most meetings are terribly inefficient. We spend the first 15 minutes making small talk. Then, we rush through a laundry list of topics, forcing us to summarise complex discussions into bite-sized portions. We both walk away feeling rushed, without really solving our issues.
Meetings have an extrovert bias. A lot of people, especially in orgs like sales, prefer to just “Hop on a 30 min call” instead of actually doing the hard work of thinking about a problem. And during the meeting, they’ll simply process their thoughts in the moment, so everyone ends up agreeing with whoever talks the most or has the highest authority.
Meetings create a sense of fake alignment. Many meetings don’t have a written agenda or a stated goal. They might feel good because the interactions are usually friendly, but that doesn’t mean that they’re productive. Furthermore, people often misunderstand each other, leading to the classic “Hey, I thought that you would pull the numbers first before we started on the slides?” type of situations.
So, What Are We To Do?
I’ve been inspired by the ideas behind Cal Newport’s A World Without Email (affiliate link). His main premise is that email and chat tools like Slack are detrimental to productivity and focus. However, I think meetings fall into that category too, especially if they’re getting in the way of getting actual work done. They contribute to what he calls the “hyperactive hive mind”.
Here are three ways we can use his ideas to improve our relationship with meetings:
Rely primarily on asynchronous communication. Meetings aren’t the best vehicle to move work forward. The best way is to implement a project management system like Asana or Trello, if you’re lucky enough to work in an org that uses one. If not, then at the very least, through a project tracker or document. Why? Because tools like these centralise all the communication in one place, and forces everyone to be specific. If I assign someone a task, I’m forced to think about exactly what I need and be specific about my ask, instead of asking someone to “look into this”.
Meetings can be used to resolve tricky issues. Yes, sometimes it’s easier to discuss complex issues over a meeting. Therefore, meetings can be used to unblock issues that can’t be resolved through asynchronous communication. These meetings should: 1) have a specific agenda with the issues documented in a shared document, 2) have people thinking about the issues before the meeting, and 3) have written action items with clear owners
Some meetings serve other purposes. Not all meetings are bad: There are some meetings I do like to attend, like our weekly sales rallies and our quarterly business reviews. These are opportunities to hear from the boss, celebrate a few wins, and just catch up with people. They help to make office life fun. Sometimes, they also have specific purposes like sharing learnings or evolving strategy (The good folks at Reforge call these “rituals“).
What’s your relationship to meetings? Do you think these ideas are realistic?
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This week’s writing prompt in the Shiny Dime challenge was “Write a summary of your favourite book or movie”. I didn’t follow the brief because I don’t really HAVE a favourite book, so I decided to write about meetings instead.
Also, I got REALLY stuck on this post for some reason. In the past few weeks, I wrote drafts on several other topics which I discarded because they were just too frustrating to continue. So I decided to start afresh, not overthink it, and just write a short post. Thanks for being patient and sticking with me 🙂
