Get back precious time spent on useless meetings ⏰
Even billionaires still only have 24 hours in a day
Time is our most precious commodity. To find the time to do the things that bring us meaning and impact, we need to reduce bloat. Bloat can be found in many places, particularly in our collaboration - specifically in meetings.
5 Problems With Meetings
1 - Too Many Meetings
We call this problem 'The Avalanche'. Synchronous gatherings reach a tipping point wherein no-one has any time left to write or think in between them. So the only way to address any topic is with yet more meetings. Meetings beget meetings until your calendar looks like a badly-played game of Tetris.
💡 Call a meeting moratorium - no meetings for one week to give everyone a chance to get back on top of their emails, documents and get some precious thinking space!
2 - The Meeting Goes Nowhere
No decisions. No actions. No new ideas. Lots of activity but no forward progress. We call this 'The Treadmill'. Occasionally, it gets so dispiriting that someone hits the 'incline' button, making things needlessly more difficult just to get some variety.
💡 Be clear on the purpose of the meetings and their success criteria from the outset. Only attend meetings where these things have been communicated.
3 - The Meeting Should Have Been An Email/Doc
We call this 'The Fellowship Of The Ring'. Everyone knows that a modest amount of asynchronous communication could have been used to articulate the main facts and reach some obvious conclusions. However, a live gathering felt like the only way to honor the weight and importance of the subject - to make sure everyone was paying enough attention to it. It also provided the illusion that everyone had the opportunity to weigh in.
💡 Imagine you cannot have a meeting. What would you do instead? Think about what you need and the simplest route to get there.
4 - The Meeting Had No Purpose Or Agenda
We call this 'The Floatation Tank'. 40 minutes into the meeting, you're still none the wiser as to why it was convened. Less a meeting, more an ambient experience; one that has slowly shut your brain down for lack of obvious direction / stimulus. It's taken all of your willpower so far not to switch to playing Animal Crossing on your phone. It's now a dice-roll whether it will end before you actually fall asleep.
💡 Ban meetings without a clearly stated purpose. Ensure that a meeting has at least 3 agenda points (indicating that the steps of the conversation have been broken down).
5 - Poor / Harmful / Toxic Behaviors
We call this 'The Gauntlet'. The meeting has been yet another 30 minutes spent trapped with the guy for whom a successful meeting is one in which he occupies every square inch of verbal space. You keep wishing the meeting owner would step in and do something but she's too busy calculating the politics of letting things run their course. Whenever you try to add something, there's always someone ready to reply with a "no, we tried that before...". And when you do finally get your idea out, someone repeats it and takes the credit.
💡 Have a designated facilitator for each meeting - someone whose role in the conversation is to make sure everyone is able to participate.
This is the simply tip of the iceberg. We’ve created a comprehensive course called Fix Your Meetings and we are thrilled to say the feedback has been phenomenal.
We understand the irony of asking people overwhelmed with too many meetings to take time out for this course but we promise you it will be worthwhile. The time you’ll save going forward will more than make up for the time spent in the workshops. If you’d like to explore this for your team, grab a discovery call or drop us an email.