Interrupting your flow to attend a meeting is frustrating and an all too common occurrence. Because while meetings can be a powerful team building and decision making tool, they can also be a huge productivity killer.
First, You should always keep and prioritize your one-on-ones. Those are the most important meetings you have and you should always prepare for them .
For your other meetings, here is a list of ways to help you review and vet your meetings for value.
Choose to attend only key presentations
Presentations normally have a recording and slides that go along with them. Which means you can take in the information at a better time for you. Just make sure you do! You might be held responsible for knowing the information. Don’t wait to long to watch them as you might miss your opportunity for to give feedback.
When in doubt talk to your manager and explain that your time would be better spent doing your other work.
- See if you can watch the video and read the slides later
Battle your F.O.M.O.
Your fear of missing out (FOMO) could be the reason you are attending a lot of your many meetings. However the truth is if you don’t contribute to the discussion with questions and/or answers, there’s no reason to be there. You can get the updates or watch the recording later. If you are marked optional, decline the meeting.
I think it is also worth mentioning, being a spectator in lots of meetings will not get your promotion. As a manager, I considered people’s contribution in meetings as part of the promotion and review discussions. If you are leading and driving decisions, that will help, not watching others.
If you are unsure about contributing, ask the scheduler what their expectations are of you. Once you are marked “optional” or agreed with the scheduler that you are, decline the meeting.
- Decline meetings if you don’t see value and can’t contribute. Especially if you are optional.
- Being a spectator won’t get you promoted
Require an agenda and goal for the meeting
Don’t accept any meeting with no description and an ambiguous title. There is no way to judge if you are even the correct person for the meeting! Take this as your opportunity to turn the meeting into an email.
Reach out to the scheduler and ask for an agenda and the goal of the meeting. If you don’t get them with enough time to prepare, decline the meeting or ask for it to be rescheduled until you can review an agenda.
With the agenda and goal in hand, see if you can answer everything in an email. Yes, try to turn the meeting into an email! I have easily gotten out of 20% of my meetings by asking for the agenda and then sending documentation or answering their questions. Even if I couldn’t get out of it, the meeting went much better with the agenda and goal.
- Ask for an agenda and goal before the meeting
- Try to answer everything via email
Get another representative
At this point you are no longer optional and feel like you can contribute based on the agenda. However there might be another out, ask yourself “Can another person take your place?”.
Look at the invite list and see if there is another that can be the representative for the team. Maybe this would be a good growth opportunity for someone else to lead. If you can identify someone else, sync with them and make sure you both share the same ideas.
- Review the invites and see if another representative attend.
- See if this meeting is a growth opportunity for someone else.
Ask if the meeting was valuable
As I cleared off my one-time meetings, I realized how many recurring meetings I was participating in. At first all I was reluctant to do anything to them as they were all valuable.. at least at one point. Were they still valuable?
I evaluated the last two meetings in each recurring meeting. I gave the meeting a mental “check” if I contributed, I found value and we filled the time with meaningful content. Any series with two checks was kept.
Those meetings without two checks were on the chopping block. The next occurrence of the meeting I asked everyone If they found it valuable. If they did, then could we increase the time between meetings to have more to talk about. Going from every two weeks to once a month or quarterly.
With these methods, I was able to cancel a bunch of those never-ending recurring meetings. Other meetings were bumped up to quarterly meetups. A surprising side effect was better attendance due to the infrequency of the meeting.
- Continuously audit recurring meetings for value
- Try increasing the time between occurrences
Let me know how these work for you
You hopefully have some ways to get out of some of your meetings! This by no means you won’t have any meetings, but hopefully the meetings you do have will be better and you will find them valuable.
Give these a try and let me know how they work for you! Are their other techniques you use to cut the number of meetings you are in?