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
