Take back the calendar – say no to pointless meetings

You’re in the office early because you’ve got a busy day ahead, and you’re looking forward to being productive: there’s a presentation to prepare, a phone call with a supplier, and you need at least two connection-free hours for some deep research on a new project. Then a colleague goes and ruins it all with the type of email that strikes fear into office workers around the world: ding! It’s a meeting request. “I’ve scheduled two hours for us to brainstorm. Forget the agenda, let’s just think outside the box and see where we go!” There are useful meetings and there are… not so useful meetings and, in some companies, the culture of setting them up can get in the way of making actual decisions – so how do you figure out when to say yes, when to say no, and how to say no?

Stay relevant

Your time is one of your most valuable assets and – with any luck – your company rewards you well for it. So you’re actually doing your employer a favour by not blindly accepting every request that lands in your inbox. There’s no point listening to a presentation from a department whose work doesn’t impact yours. So question the relevance of the meeting and what, if anything, it will do to help you perform your role to the best of your ability. It’s all about time-management: if yours is better spent elsewhere, go elsewhere.

Lead the agenda

Of course, it’s not always your colleague with the thwarted ambition to tread the boards: most people like the sound of their own voice, and perhaps you’ve also been guilty of scheduling a meeting that doesn’t need to happen with people who don’t need to be there. A good way to check this is by creating an agenda: if you can’t think of anything to put on it then you might want to avoid spreading a bout of meeting fatigue by thinking twice about taking up others’ time. What at first seemed like a good way of solving a problem might be better-served as a one-on-one chat.

Time it well

From comedy to cooking, timing is everything. Would Friends have been as good with less talented actors? What about that soufflé left a minute longer? And so it goes with meetings: if you’ve scheduled a meeting to make decisions about a particular project but you don’t have all the relevant information to make those decisions, push the meeting back. You’ll only have to schedule another meeting when you do have all the details, and no one wants to go through the same thing twice. Like Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Cancel with care

OK, so you work in marketing and the developers’ coding and UX-journey sesh is unlikely to be of much help as far as you’re concerned. Even if they always have top-notch snacks. So how do you get out of it while maintaining good relations with your colleagues? Politely declining a meeting can be done quickly and simply: rather than hitting the “No” button, pick up the phone and call or –  better still – speak to the organiser in person, if possible. President Bill Clinton famously managed the entire USA without ever sending an email, so there must be a lesson in there somewhere.

Give your meetings some meat

If it’s happening, get into it. Find a room with plenty of light to keep attendees engaged, and provide refreshments that spread a little cheer. After all, we humans are social animals and we like to get together when there’s a purpose and an inviting environment. So ensure there’s a fixed agenda to be discussed during a fixed amount of time – and stick to both. You could even turn your meeting into a Jack Bauer-style challenge by setting a countdown clock and informing colleagues what you want to achieve before it hits 00:00. Why not stand up for the duration? There’s nothing like being mild discomfort to concentrate the mind.

Caps-lock warning: according to Harvard Business School’s Nancy Koehn, there are FOUR BILLION meetings a year in the US alone, and over half of the people she surveyed said the meetings they went to were a waste of time. If we were to put a conservative figure on it (assuming each meeting lasts an hour), that’s TWO BILLION hours a year that could have been spent doing something else. The lost productivity almost doesn’t bear thinking about – but the US Bureau of Labour Statistics has done the thinking anyway, and put a price on it: $37bn (£28.4bn). The good news, however, is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Most meetings and the way they’re run are done out of habit, so stay mindful and think: what would my day be like without it?

Got a meeting that does matter? Let us hook you up. Check out your nearest meeting rooms right here