Meetings - Why less is more
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:
Poorly chosen title
No clear purpose
No agenda
No chairperson
Unnecessary guests
We don’t mark who is optional
We don’t check availability
Doesn’t start or end on time
Gobbles up arbitrary 30 and 60 min timeslots
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:
Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time.
Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone.
Meetings are the last resort, not the first option.