Love these slides, hard agree on _all_ points. But, be absolutely certain on the culture before you start declining meetings, even if for valid reasons like outlined in this presentation. Declining meetings can be seen as a negative, "not a team player", thing... and, I really have to be certain on my leadership, the company, and the context before I push back on someone wanting my time. Even if their request for my time was arbitrary, or useless.
As somone who vigorously declines meetings, this gave me some extra criteria to use (estimated speaking time per attendee)
What I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every meeting that I schedule.
I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
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For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of which are followed nor what anyone else wants.
Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
Interestingly, both of your points could be addressed by adopting a company-wide policy: if a meeting has no agenda attached, it is optional to join. Or, in short, "no agenda - no attenda."
Does underrate discussion. Larger shifts in strategy require iterated discussion and consensus formation. Not every meeting is this, nor should it be, but this is something that is underrepresented and under respected.
I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer.
e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons.
In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them.
I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.
Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly.
Interesting that "Small - Brainstorming" is marked as a bad meeting flavour.
I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've worked with are like this.
But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely must brainstorm then "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a brainstorming meeting.
Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse.
Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and practice most of it as well.
"Small brainstorming" is a bad meeting flavor? Not sure I agree with that. I find that brainstorming meetings with >3 people turn into trainwrecks.
Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time waste for most companies.
Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up.
Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make email intentional and high-value.
Point being: if any one of (1) email, or (2) chat, or (3) meetings is not working well, I bet you have problems in either or both of the others.
I remember Merlin Mann, of "Inbox Zero" fame, coming to Twitter to talk about improving meetings around 2010. His list was a superset of this and forever shaped my approach to meetings. The change management part of fixing this behavior is a much heavier lift than you might expect. These are behaviors that are engrained well before the current environment.
These are fantastic! I've done similar and seen some positive outcomes at work. As the one usually sending meetings - I have been leaning heavily on asynchronous first (teams chat) then if needed we hop into a focused meeting with a clear agenda. It's been liberating to see the reactions that other people like this too instead of another meeting. More often than not we never needed the meeting.
Change management is the issue, not meeting management. I worked for an agency who hired productivity consultants[1] to help with meetings, email, and time management. I thought it was a very courageous choice. It’s extremely hard to measure the impact of this type of engagement, and some people hated it. The system was good though.
I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I’ve tried many productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that stuck (other than GTD).
Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a stan
While I have several disagreements with this deck, there are two large ones:
1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to prepare for the weekly staff meeting, rather than many small meetings every day. It also avoids the problem of people feeling not included - you're always invited to the one huge meeting every week, it's up to you to attend or skip.
2. The problem with meeting culture cannot be solved with education on how to say no, it's about admitting that attending meetings actually does convey a lot of things. Lots of information is not shared outside of meetings. Seniority of attendees actually does have a huge impact on visibility in folks' careers. A lot of the advice in this slide deck feels like it should work, but doesn't in practice because of self interest.
The education that needs to happen is quite different imo:
- leadership needs to be done through writing
- meetings should be recorded and minutes sent out broadly, along with allowing silent attendance.
- decisions need to give time for dissent outside of meeting attendees before committing.
To be blunt, this looks like a feel-good piece from someone who spent an ungodly amount of time in shitty meetings but have no agency on the situation, will vent with diagrams as they can't tackle the actual issues of the org not giving a shit about their time.
If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped.
Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are.
It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them.
Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job.
Or a mix of both.
Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.
The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary.
"Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!"
"Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic."
Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executive summary of a book instead of reading the book. You're letting the clock dictate the importance of something to a company, and not the something. It's like delaying a huge feature launch because the person in charge of it is out sick.
The reading -is the thing-. Discussing the difficult decision is -the thing-.
I recognize that there is a fishbowl effect, where if you allocate four hours for a meeting about office dishwasher etiquette, you'll be amazed that all four hours are filled with lively, constant discussion. So there does need to be some light facilitation. But I'd argue that over-facilitating is just as unproductive as under-facilitating.
As for the other stuff, agendas are great. A purpose for a meeting is great. Having the right people in the meeting, great.
Relatedly, the craziest thing I keep hearing in corporate land is this idea of "open calendars." So your hard-won 15-minute lunch break can vanish because someone drops a meeting on it, and you first hear about it via email notif. Calendars should be opt-in, period.
One of the costs of saying no to meetings is that going to other people's (useless) meetings is a super low effort way to say "I value our working relationship." Not going often explicitly sends the opposite message.
Sometimes there is a whole set of rituals used to "prove" you actually care about the group, and the rituals only ever happen in meetings, and you cannot change them without bothering a lot of people.
63 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 69.1 ms ] threadWhat I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every meeting that I schedule.
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For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of which are followed nor what anyone else wants.
Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules.
So...
What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.
People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.
Even if I can contribute real value to 20 meetings which I am invited to, I can't attend all of them.
e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons.
In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them.
I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.
Brian doesn't work at NYT anymore I don't think
https://archive.org/details/meetingsbloodymeetings
This seems to be missed by the author.
I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've worked with are like this.
But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely must brainstorm then "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a brainstorming meeting.
Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse.
Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and practice most of it as well.
Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time waste for most companies.
1. How To Use Teams/Slack/Etc.
2. How To Use Email
Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up.
Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make email intentional and high-value.
Point being: if any one of (1) email, or (2) chat, or (3) meetings is not working well, I bet you have problems in either or both of the others.
I got a ton out of it. I took their suggestions. I’ve tried many productivity systems but theirs seems to be the only one that stuck (other than GTD).
Full disclosure: they sent me a Starbucks gift card for being a stan
[1] https://doublegemini.com/
1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to prepare for the weekly staff meeting, rather than many small meetings every day. It also avoids the problem of people feeling not included - you're always invited to the one huge meeting every week, it's up to you to attend or skip.
2. The problem with meeting culture cannot be solved with education on how to say no, it's about admitting that attending meetings actually does convey a lot of things. Lots of information is not shared outside of meetings. Seniority of attendees actually does have a huge impact on visibility in folks' careers. A lot of the advice in this slide deck feels like it should work, but doesn't in practice because of self interest.
The education that needs to happen is quite different imo:
- leadership needs to be done through writing
- meetings should be recorded and minutes sent out broadly, along with allowing silent attendance.
- decisions need to give time for dissent outside of meeting attendees before committing.
If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped.
Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are.
It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them.
Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job.
Or a mix of both.
Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.
"Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!"
"Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic."
Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executive summary of a book instead of reading the book. You're letting the clock dictate the importance of something to a company, and not the something. It's like delaying a huge feature launch because the person in charge of it is out sick.
The reading -is the thing-. Discussing the difficult decision is -the thing-.
I recognize that there is a fishbowl effect, where if you allocate four hours for a meeting about office dishwasher etiquette, you'll be amazed that all four hours are filled with lively, constant discussion. So there does need to be some light facilitation. But I'd argue that over-facilitating is just as unproductive as under-facilitating.
As for the other stuff, agendas are great. A purpose for a meeting is great. Having the right people in the meeting, great.
Relatedly, the craziest thing I keep hearing in corporate land is this idea of "open calendars." So your hard-won 15-minute lunch break can vanish because someone drops a meeting on it, and you first hear about it via email notif. Calendars should be opt-in, period.
Sometimes there is a whole set of rituals used to "prove" you actually care about the group, and the rituals only ever happen in meetings, and you cannot change them without bothering a lot of people.