Cancel the damn meeting

90% of the meetings shouldn’t be meetings. And the remaining 10% shouldn’t be longer than 25 min. But how do we get there?

“Do we have everyone?”

The other week, a client, the founder of a FinTech startup I work with, asked me to join one of their team meetings to advise on a team scaling project not progressing as expected. So I showed up at 10 AM on the day and listened in.

This is how we spent our time:

10 - 10.15 AM: we waited for other people who weren’t done with their previous meetings to join.

10.15 - 10.30 AM: we tried to find the leadership development plan, the hiring forecasts and other files we planned to discuss; we waited to be granted access to the files, and asked for clarifications regarding the files we planned to discuss.

10.30 AM: a key person on the call, one of the co-founders, had to drop out to join another call.

10.30 - 11.30 AM: we discussed the issues at hand, sometimes directly but mostly tangentially, as we side-tracked on topics that didn’t have much to do with the meeting.

At 11.30, ninety minutes later, we ‘walked’ out of the meeting, our heads full of scattered tidbits of thoughts, feeling like sparrows chasing crumbs at the park. Half of us were still wondering why we attended the meeting. 

The worst part?

We still had no plan other than to have a follow-up meeting two days later to “circle back to a few things.”

Does this sound familiar?

Most people think meetings = getting work done, but that’s nonsense.

Image source: readytomanage.com

Meetings cost a fortune & fail more often than succeed

It’s estimated that $37 billion in salary cost is wasted each year by employees attending unnecessary meetings. Meetings take up an average of two days per week for managers and professionals. Yet the full costs are often greater: cancellations, rescheduling, and switching context (from focused work to a meeting or in between meetings) are costly and time-consuming.

Just look at these few stats from Otter.ai:

What the employees think:

What the managers think:

Do you know anyone who has to work overtime to get their actual work done after they’re done with meetings? 

I used to, I occasionally still have to, and I know many people who set their Slack to “away” and sneak offline to do their core jobs for a couple of hours after work or during weekends. That’s not normal. None of this is normal. Normal is spending most of your work time doing the, ahem, work you were hired for. Coding, designing, hiring, testing, solving problems, reconciling accounts, calling clients. Whatever that is, it should occupy most of your work time.

It is crystal clear we’re talking about something that is both crazy expensive AND it doesn’t work.

So why do we keep doing it?

A quick, 4-step action plan

The solution isn't just cancelling the meeting or simply deciding to have shorter ones. 

Anyone can do that. The solution is working in a different way, implementing a different operating system where everything doesn’t have to happen in meetings. Most startups and knowledge work teams simply need better systems and ways of collaborating.  

So let’s talk about one simple change anyone can implement this week.

At Livit, the company I run, we adopted the concept of “meeting budgets”*: you shouldn’t spend more than 10% of your work time on internal meetings. It works like any other budget: whatever doesn’t fit, doesn’t fit and gets moved around or put on a wishlist.

To make this budget work, we use a 4-step process to eliminate meetings and get more done:

1. Forget the calendar for now. Start with a blank document in your tool of choice (Google Docs, Notion, etc). 

2. Write down: a. the purpose of the potential meeting and b. a few bullet points with your main ideas

3. Share the document with other people and ask them to

   1. Add their own thoughts 

   2. Comment on what others wrote 

   3. Do so within a deadline (be mindful of giving enough time for people to think and contribute meaningfully, but not get snowed under; 1-2 days are usually ideal)

4. Then have the meeting if still needed. Most of the time, it won’t; and when it will still be needed, it will take a fraction of the time it used to. And that saved time can go to - you’ve guessed it - getting work done.

90% of the meetings shouldn’t be meetings. And the remaining 10% shouldn’t be longer than 25 min.

So yes, cancel the meeting.

And replace it with getting some actual work done. The kind that moves the needle, changes the game, shapes a new version of reality, or simply gets the to-do’s done, so you can get on with the rest of your life.

Now I’m off to that follow-up meeting to make damn sure it won’t take another 90 minutes.

____________________

*Perhaps one of the reasons we have world-class engagement (top 2% across 100 countries) and we are one of Asia’s Best Places To Work.

P.S. if your team keeps insisting on having awfully unnecessary meetings, there are now a suite of AI bots that can attend the meeting for you and give you a summary of the notes.