I’ve gone to war with meetings. After a week of being constantly stressed, going from meeting to meeting with no time to get anything else done I finally cracked and decided something had to happen. Time to abolish those meetings.

Agendaless Meetings

Meetings need an agenda. There’s nothing worse than rocking up to a meeting where nobody remembers what you’re supposed to be talking about. A load of people, sitting around, burning time (& money). It doesn’t take a lot from an organiser: when you schedule the meeting, just add a couple of bullet points to remind us what we’ll be talking about. A little bit of kindness there saves so much wasted time.

I’ve seen some teams really go to town with agendas and create a shared Google Doc to maintain an agenda, but often a couple of bullet points to remind everyone why we’re here is more than enough.

Without an agenda, nobody is arriving prepared: we’re making it all up on the spot. Is this really the most efficient use of everyone’s time? Now I don’t have time to spend an hour preparing for every meeting beforehand - but at least if I know what the meeting’s going to be about, if I need to do something in advance I’ve got a chance of getting it done. Are there actions to follow up on? Something you need attendees to be prepared to talk about? Then put it in the agenda. Otherwise all you’ll end up doing is wasting the time and agreeing to have a follow-up meeting to cover the actual content. If you all remember. Good luck with that.

Recurring Meetings

My recent realisation was that recurring meetings are my problem. In a typical week I have 17 hours of recurring meetings. My week is nearly 50% occupied, before I’ve even started. Some of those meetings are 1-to-1s. That’s fine, they can stay as they are - it’s important there’s a regular space for people to raise things with their manager.

The problem is the regular meetings, normally with a number of senior stakeholders, with no agenda. Okay, some of our recurring meetings do have an agenda, because I’ve previously complained about it. But you know what happens? We rarely stick to the agenda! So effectively we still have no agenda.

They normally have titles like “status update” or “catch up” or “steering committee”. The meeting title is as close to an agenda as we’re ever going to get. “Today we’ll be talking about project X”. Great. Bring everything you’ve got to discuss on project X, with no filter, no prioritisation and no plan. Interesting chat will happen and decisions will be taken, of that I am sure. But does that mean the meeting was a success? Increasingly, I think not.

If you get a group of senior people together, with a vague idea of a topic - interesting chat will happen, regardless of whether there’s an agenda. Regardless of whether it was the original intent of the meeting. That doesn’t mean that the meeting needed to happen, or at least: maybe it didn’t need all the attendees, maybe it didn’t need to happen right then. Maybe we could have called a specific meeting for the topic that was actually discussed?

This was my insight this week: we had a regular meeting and the agenda was completely de-railed by a topic that was clearly much more important than anything else we had to talk about. But why hadn’t a specific meeting been called to discuss that?!

The Solution

I’m going to try an experiment: how many of these meetings should have been an email? Certainly for status updates, do we need everyone to be on a synchronous call to cascade the project status? An email would’ve been fine. Now, if there’s a problem - then perhaps that warrants a meeting. “Project X is running behind by a week, we need to agree what we tell clients”. That’s a meeting that absolutely should happen. But it can happen off the back of the status update that warns everyone the project is running late.

Now I recognise part of the problem with this plan is that its difficult to book time in senior stakeholders’ calendars, because they’re so busy all the time. So this is going to require quite a shift. I need all the senior staff to abolish all their teams’ status update calls, to free time in their calendars so that when we need to book a meeting, there is space. As a side-effect, I’m hoping it means there’s time in everyone’s calendars away from meetings to get work done.

This requires quite a cultural shift, and it needs to happen relatively quickly or it won’t stick. Will it work? Let’s check back in a couple of months and see…