Ep 148: Meetings are a Waste of Time

You check the time and realize that you have 4 minutes before your next meeting. Maybe it’s an internal meeting, maybe clients are coming in. Is it in person or online? Depending on how you answer those questions, time to start scrambling so that you are where you need to be and have the information required to make this meeting a good use of your time. But guess what? I promise that you will end up waiting on someone … maybe you are that someone. Either way, you aren’t getting that time back and you haven’t even started yet. Welcome to EP 148: Meetings are a Waste of Time

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I wrote a post on this topic 11 years ago – and it was also titled “Meetings are a Waste of time.” When I wrote this down as a topic, it wasn’t because I had already covered this topic a decade ago, it was because I had forgotten that I had covered it and I most likely had just come out of a meeting that I felt was an unproductive waste of time. Is this going to be a crabby podcast episode? It’s entirely possible, but you can hit the pause button, go grab a beer, and then restart the show because I feel like most people feel like I do when it comes to the majority of meetings they attend.

I am becoming more and more sensitive to sitting in meetings where I think:

What am I doing in this meeting?

You already said that, move on …

What does that have to do with what we are supposed to be talking about?

I went back to reread that post from 2013 and as I went through the points, I typically thought to myself “Nailed It” but things are a little different for me now and shockingly, I thought I was in a lot of meetings before, I am in ten times that number now. It’s not even close!

A couple of caveats to consider:

There is a huge difference between professional environment meetings and volunteer organization meetings, Meetings with Clients, and internal meetings. Along with those distinctions comes a slightly different pain threshold for what is acceptable behavior or not. While I would like volunteer meetings to be run with the same efficiency, I have to acknowledge that these are “volunteer” based meetings and if the people attending have to do something as part of their real jobs, I am not going to get in their way.

Probably 50% of the time I spend in meetings isn’t scheduled. My office (air quotes) is pretty open and it lends itself to pop-in meetings – which was purposeful at the time of design. Exactly what is supposed to happen DOES in fact happen, but it does become disruptive to developing any sort of rhythm to the creative process.

Client meetings generally fall outside of the requirements I considered, unless I am the one who is slowing things down – which does happen. I wrote in the 2013 post the following:

“At least half of the meetings I attend, nothing is really happening other than the swapping of stories. One on hand, that’s okay because I’m the Pecos Bill of stories, but I simply don’t have the time for it anymore.”

So in an effort to reclaim some lost time, here are some tips I have collected and follow to help make sure that my days don’t get longer by sitting in unnecessary or gratuitous meetings.

Start your meetings on time jump to 17:39
If someone is late, that’s their problem. Don’t review information that’s already been covered. I make it an effort to be on time to meetings and it drives me insane when someone else is late and I have to just sit there waiting on them. Not only a waste of time, it’s disrespectful – it says “my time is more important than yours”. I wrote “For the Love of All That is Holy … Be on Time” and it sums up my opinion on the matter rather succinctly.

Set the meeting length to an hour and end the meeting on time. jump to 20:19
Unfortunately, some meetings always seem to take longer than an hour but I’ve found that when I walk into a meeting and tell people they have an hour before I have to leave I am always amazed that we can almost always get everything done in that hour.

End meetings early. jump to 29:16
People seem to respond more favorably to attending meetings when they actually end sooner than they are scheduled. I know that when I have resigned myself to sitting in an hour long meeting with the structural engineer and it ends early?! I’d better go buy a lottery ticket because it must be my lucky day.

Limit the number of participants in a meeting to a few people as possible. jump to 32:18
In the case of meetings, the “more” is definitely not the “merrier”. Whenever you get a large group of people in a meeting, there will be items covered that do not pertain to everyone in the room … and that’s when things turn like a pork sandwich left out in the sun. Next thing you know, there are multiple meetings taking place and you’ve lost control.

If this is your meeting, keep things on point. jump to 36:02
This is the one rule that can make you come across like an a-hole if you’re not careful. As soon as someone starts telling a tale “this one time, I was doing the air-conditioning…” you have to gauge the temperature of the conversation to determine how to cut that person off. Sometimes I have to let that first story go but as soon as the next person starts to tell their air-conditioning story I don’t let them get too far before interrupting. If someone tries to hijack the meeting with whoppers, it’s your job to get things back in focus.

Do not let people work on other things during the meeting. jump to 41:33
If it isn’t important for them to be paying attention, they don’t need to be there in the first place. I am becoming more and more a believer that multi-tasking isn’t a real thing, you are just doing multiple things at less than your capabilities would normally allow.

No cell phones. jump to 45:37
Don’t let people use their cell phones during a meeting – but good luck on this one.
For the record, and as I confessed on the podcast episode, this is something that I fail at from time to time. While I recognize that I shouldn’t be on my phone, there are times when I feel like I need to be doing something else so I pop on when the conversation isn’t directed at me and I try and address some other pressing need. (It should go without saying that I am not talking about shopping on Amazon or playing Candy Crush during a meeting). Bottom line is that it shouldn’t happen but I feel this one is getting away from us a bit.

Have an agenda. jump to 47:28
For most of the semi-casual meetings that I have, this is a bit overkill. What I do try and do is to outline via email what items are to be covered during the meeting and I make sure the primaries have that information prior to the meeting. I will print this list out and make sure that we stay on the list. If something else comes up, I will add it to the bottom of the list and if we can get to it in the allotted time we can discuss it at the end. Since it’s normally other people who bring up new topics, this is an incentive to them to get through the things that formed the basis for our meeting in the first place.

Control the dialog between participants. jump to 50:07
This means only have one conversation going at the table at a time. I have sat in meetings where a group of 10 people are having 4 mini-meetings and since I am generally the only one taking notes, I can’t cover what everyone is talking about and things get missed.

Assign Responsibility and Action items. jump to 50:26
For the items reviewed, make sure that before you move on to the next item, that task is assigned to specific parties during the meeting. We have all been in meetings where everyone is talking about all the things that we should be doing, then the meeting ends and nobody takes responsibility for getting any of those things done.

Eliminate “informational” meetings. jump to 54:35
These are meetings where everyone is collected into a room and talked at – mass information distribution. If no participation is required from the people in the room, issue a memo. When it was something so important that we wanted to make sure that we knew people had received the data, they were required to check off their initials to show they had received the information.

Regularly scheduled status meetings are a complete time waste. jump to 57:17
Only call a meeting when there is something specific to be reviewed. There are people out there who will want regularly scheduled meetings in an effort to make sure that people are doing what they are supposed to be doing and the threat of being called out at a “regularly scheduled meeting” is the incentive to force people into action. That’s great for the one person who needs it but it’s a waste of everyone else’s time.

Would you rather?  jump to 60:45

There are some interpretations to this question that fundamentally impact the direction of the conversation.

Would you rather have a shower with no door or curtain, or bathroom with no door?

At the lowest and least interesting interpretation, does bathroom mean only rooms that have bathing functionality? Let’s just acknowledge that this is really about showering and using the toilet – nobody cares if you are brushing your teeth.

Ep 148: Meetings are a Waste of Time

As much as I typically don’t care for meetings, I will acknowledge that they serve an incredibly important role in any collaborative process and their impact should not be diminished. The point I was trying to convey is that the difference between a well run and prepared for meeting and one that is neither of those things cannot be understated. I have also noticed that there is a difference between meetings done with internal groups and those done for clients – rarely do I see client meetings where people are not prepared, but the internal meetings seem to be the ones that are pulled together either last minute or items resolved in real-time during the meeting (now I really do feel like I am just complaining). I should also point out that I am not great at running meetings – certainly not as good as I should be, but I am painfully aware of it which probably contributes to the hyper-sensitivity I have towards everyone else’s meetings. Just like you, I am a work in progress.

Cheers,

Special thanks to today’s sponsor Construction Specialties – they are so focused on the importance of mastering movement, that they have created CEUs specifically on mastering movement. Each course is worth 1 AIA LU/HSW and is part of the Mastering Movement Academy by CS. Visit masteringmovement.net to take this and other courses.