10 Reasons We Need To Stop Having Meetings

It’s an interesting fact that 83.5% of our working life is now spent in meetings. Actually sorry, that’s not a fact – I just made it up. But it occurred to me this week, while I attempted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get a piece of actual work done, that most of us spend most of our time in meetings. Meetings with clients, team-meetings, inter-agency meetings, meetings about meetings, meetings about why we have so many meetings about meetings. At a recent meeting, the overwhelming conclusion was that most of them are annoying, a lot of them are a waste of time and yet we keep dragging ourselves to them every single day like a zombie with no legs crawling towards a human trapped under a car following the No-deal Brexit Apocalypse of 2019.  

Here are some reasons, or should I say ‘agenda items’, why I think our collective New Year’s resolution should be to cut-down on meetings…

1: The start of meetings

The first few minutes of a meeting are like arriving at a Tinder date to discover that your match is wearing a Coldplay t-shirt. It’s awkward and you want to get the hell out of there as fast as Usain Bolt on roller-blades. They try to make polite chit-chat about your weekend or the weather or the minor delays on the Bakerloo Line, and you reply in a friendly manner as if you’re fascinated by an earlier signal failure at Charing Cross. But on the inside, you’re wondering whether, if you jump out of the window, you’ll be able to break few enough of limbs to could crawl to somewhere; anywhere where this meeting isn’t happening.

2: ‘Shall we do a quick round the table?’

Listening to 17 people take it in turns to say their name and job title wastes time and helps nobody. And what’s worse, some people take this opportunity to show their personality. ‘Hi, I’m Dan – Head of Marketing.’ / ‘Hello! Gemma here from the PR agency.’ / ‘Oh no, is it me? But I’ve just sipped some water! HAHAHAHAHAHA. I’m Tim [art director], I draw pictures.” Fuck you, Tim.

3: People love talking

I accept that talking can be a good thing. When it’s your sweetheart talking about the first moment they realised they wanted to snog you, that’s nice. When it’s your mate talking about a funny thing that happened in Lidl involving some half-price muffins, that’s absolutely fine. But when it’s someone in a meeting talking, without interruption, for 19 minutes about something that could be described in 14 seconds, that’s simply not acceptable – particularly if that thing is anything to do with “reaching out”, “circling back” or “getting some (bloody) ducks in a row”. Meetings should be like 1990s gameshows: if you don’t make your point within 60 seconds, a ceiling trap-door opens and a bucket of green gunge is dropped onto your head while everyone else in the meeting laughs at you and they all win a speedboat.

4: Most meetings should be an email

If the meeting is, say, a campaign kick-off in which we’re discussing the various core objectives, key messages and specific KPIs of a highly innovative project that’s about to launch across various platforms and touchpoints around Europe and Africa targeted at politically-minded vegan millennials, fair enough mate. But if the purpose of the meeting is to agree that we should send a client some donuts for her birthday, that should be a two-line email to which we can all reply with the ‘thumbs-up’ emoji and continue going about our lives.

5: None of the tech will work

One thing you can guarantee about meetings is that if you’re planning to do anything more technological than have a conversation with other human beings, it won’t work. Want your PowerPoint on the big screen? No problem! (as long as you’ve got apple’s latest Thunderbolt adapter in your bag along with the perfect combination of chargers, extension cables and Harry Potter’s magic wand) Someone hoping to join the meeting on Skype or Hangouts? No problem! Just prepare to spend half an hour figuring out why their left nostril is frozen on screen and the audio sounds like the chorus of a death-metal song. The fact is, if you need any type of tech for a meeting, there’s literally only one way it’s gonna happen: “Can someone please call I.T?”

6: There are never enough chairs

Last week I was in a meeting where two of us were sat on the floor, five people were sat on window-ledges and someone was essentially straddling a Nespresso machine. It felt less like an agency meeting, more like the dance tent at Glastonbury at 2am on a Saturday. Except, instead of watching a DJ playing bangers, we were all staring at an account manager reading out a brief about a chocolate bar.

7: It’s never clear when the meeting should end

Because the first rule of Meetings Club is “your meeting shall have no clear objectives”, it can be difficult to know when they should be over. Often it’s because the hour or half-hour has run out and we all have to run to our next meeting. But that usually means ending things before you’ve properly

8: You will eat too much junk food

In order to make meetings less depressing, people often bring a little treat for everyone to share. And that’s lovely of them. The problem is, if a few people do that, you end up with six bags of Haribo, a tube of two-month-old Pringles and a family-size bag of Wagon Wheels all being passed round a meeting between seven people. And have you ever said no to a Wagon Wheel? Exactly mate. Which is why we all leave the meeting 1048 calories heavier than beforehand. #meetingeating

9: Inter-agency meetings can be like a brawl

If you work in social, it’s highly likely you’ll be in multi-agency set-ups for some or all of your clients. And let me be clear for anyone who’s ever been in a meeting with me, all of the ones we’re in are totally harmonious and enjoyable. But now and again, I hear tell that inter-agency meetings have a habit of being similar to what I imagine it feels like arriving in the courtyard on your first day in jail. Every prison gang (agency) needs to quickly assert itself as if to say “don’t mess with us or we’ll cut ya” while being careful not to step too far out of line under the watchful eye of the prison warden (client). I’ll end that metaphor here before I go on to say that, to survive, you have to go up to the biggest agency and take them down. This dynamic leads to a lot of people piping up just to make sure everyone knows who they are. “Hi everyone, Terry here from the influencer agency. Can I just say that we are fully on-board with what was just presented and we will take the conversation offline to establish next steps.” Thanks Terry. But this part of the meeting is about aligning finance spreadsheets, so not sure we need much influencer input at this stage.

10: People spend half the meeting on their phones

Irrespective of how important the meeting is, at least 15% of attendees will spend some or all of the meeting on the phone. Some might be monitoring an important work situation of course, but others will be swiping right on Tinder, booking an uber or if you’re lucky you might catch someone listening to a podcast. Or even recording one. But whatever the justification, it’s very annoying. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sometimes that annoying person. If a meeting is dragging on and I’ve got urgent food shopping to do, it’s difficult to resist a quick nosy at Ocado's 2-for-1 mangetout offers. But if we want meetings to be worthwhile, it should probably become a legal requirement (punishable by 140 hours of community service) to put your phone on Airplane Mode before you enter a meeting room. That, or we all accept that we’d rather be on our phones than in a meeting and simply send a quick email round instead.