Meetings - Why less is more

by David Reinecke  / 

We’re all tempted to fill up our team’s diary with meetings. We want collaboration and for everyone to be “on the same page”.

The irony is most meetings are essentially pageless: They have no clear purpose, no agenda and no minutes.

Could the key to great collaboration be having less but more effective meetings?

A colleague shared an idea in our management forum yesterday: What if we created a culture of no-meeting Wednesdays for our engineering teams?

The intention would be to carve out more time for deep work. A midweek infusion of learning, deliberate thinking, and producing instead of talking.

Does this suggestion mean we are anti-meetings? Not at all! Meetings have their place. We just have too many and they typically have real problems:

  1. Poorly chosen title
  2. No clear purpose
  3. No agenda
  4. No chairperson
  5. Unnecessary guests
  6. We don’t mark who is optional
  7. We don’t check availability
  8. Doesn’t start or end on time
  9. Gobbles up arbitrary 30 and 60 min timeslots
  10. No minutes taken or distributed

Sound familiar?

Our department had an off-site last week. One discussion focused on how challenging and counterproductive meetings can be, especially for knowledge workers.

We decided that as a group we wanted to be known for...

  • Having less meetings
  • Having better meetings
    My personal rules of thumb are from Basecamp’s guide to internal comms:

    1. Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time.
    2. Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone.
    3. Meetings are the last resort, not the first option.