Busy-ness is a curse. Best seen in your calendar bursting with back to back meetings. How many have a real purpose? How many even have an agenda attached to them? Does everybody invited even need to be there? The January meeting fest has begun and given me a headache.
In the US there are 55 million meetings. Per day. WTF! 55 million. And studies suggest over 50% of these are not focussed on anything of value.
As Martha Lane-Fox said in a recent Times article,
“Knowingly wasting half your time seems a strange business decision.”
As the cold fronts of the economic downturn or shallow recession are here, shouldn’t we be making more of an effort to use people’s time wisely?
And is there anything worse than a meeting invite that just says “catch-up”? Why? What’s the purpose? Should I be worried? What don’t I know? The mind spirals out of control and if you live on the edge of anxiety and stress as most people in advertising do, you start thinking more about what it could mean rather than what it actually does mean.
Most times it genuinely is just a check-in to make sure everything is OK.
I’ve been guilty of it myself but hopefully pre-empted with a conversation and defaulting to that as a subject because we default to lazy things when we’re busy.
But we can all be a little better every day. I’m not advocating to kill a catch-up because actually, catching up is vitally important to check the temperature, the stress levels and understand in a non-project related way how your team are doing. But does it need to be formalised as a meeting request?
Some, like Shopify, have eradicated meetings of more than two people which they claim will save over 76,000 hours in meetings. That may be the case but this broadside at meeting culture only works if you facilitate other mechanisms to debate and share.
IBM used to – I have no idea if they still do – limit meetings to 30 minutes. This is a drastic reduction to the default one hour that most people assume and indeed that bastard Outlook programme defaults too.
In covid times, I noticed a subtle shift in people setting meetings to 45 or deliberately 55 minutes. Presumably in an effort to avoid their meeting overload of what ended up being a string of back to back meetings meaning you needed to take your video camera off and put yourself on mute to even manage a bathroom break such was the deluge of invites and expectation that everyone was available all of the time.
Shorter is, for the most part, better. Better still is having a clear idea of what you’re meeting about and what your outcomes are. Without this you might as well just roll up to any old meeting unprepared and wing it. Meetings are meant for agreement and outcomes, not general chit-chat.
Preparation is something Amazon do. You’ve most likely heard that Bezos the space avenger has banned PowerPoint and instead asks for people to prepare memos and spends the first part reading and then discussing. They also have the famous two pizza rule which is slightly weird as surely it depends how big the pizzas are and your appetite? Given that we can wolf down a large domino’s for one person you’re back to Shopify’s no more than two rule but with the added benefit of a pizza.
There’s undoubtedly a very simple way – be clear on what you are trying to do.
This avoids the generic ‘catch up’. If you just want to catch up, ask someone for a coffee or go for walk. Don’t set a meeting.
I’ve always liked this flowchart from NOBL on ‘do you really need a meeting?’
You can tailor it to your own organisation’s culture or your own behaviours but no, you don’t always need a meeting.
If you really do, be specific about it. I still recall and try to use the POST system that Diageo had and stuck to:
P – Purpose. What is the purpose of the meeting?
O – Outcome. What outcomes do we want to achieve as a result?
S – Structure. Is it a pre-read and discuss? Is it approving recommendations? Is it a workshop or brainstorm?
T – Timing. Not just the timing of the meeting but the timing of the pre-read delivery and for the outcomes. The meeting timing is critical. You need to stick to it to avoid blathering on. This doesn’t mean you have to say ‘we’re short on time’ to try and rush people. Plan enough time to suit the P, O and S. Stick to it.
Pre-reads are essential. In our busy worlds, people are allegedly too busy to write them. The famous quote from Mark Twain is clear here.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
You need them. It will help ground people in what you’re trying to do, lay down the scenario. It avoids you having to spend the first part explaining to people. It also gets you good at writing. Writing is important. Articulating your thoughts and setting them out in a clear, accessible and concise way is a skill. You only get good at skills by practising. If you’re looking to develop in your career, one must have writing skills. Persuasion in written words is art. Set out ‘the task and the ask’.
Even better, create it as a shared document so people can start populating their responses or questions in advance. It speeds up the whole process and quite often circumvents the need to meet at all because you also let the brains of the people you need input from percolate over the ask. We don’t respond well in the moment. It’s why brainstorms end up being group think rather than best think. We default to the loudest or most senior voice in the room. Creatives typically hate brainstorms because they like to think on a problem. Going to the pub for 3 hours and playing pool seemed like they were being lazy bastards. Actually they’re letting their minds wander. And then KAPOW! The idea hits. It may come quickly or in a few days. Rarely is it in 20 seconds on a post it note in the boardroom.
In summary, meetings can be good but you need to put the effort in.
More room for thinking, less room for meeting.
