5 Tips to Make Meetings Suck Less

Your time is extremely valuable. So why do you let other people waste it?

It’s important to be wary of things that can drain your energy and waste your time. As the expression goes, if you don’t manage your time, someone else will. And if you let someone else manage your time they will prioritize their needs over yours.

Generally most people agree with and understand this concept, but things seem to fall apart when we talk about meetings.

Ah yes, those soul-sucking, hour-long bloviation sessions where we say the same thing 3 times just to fill the hour. Those meetings that could have been an email. Those meetings that just fill up our calendar because, well, they’ve always just existed.

It’s always surprising to me how much control over their time executives cede to non-executive employees who can freely book them into a meeting at any time about any topic.

Imagine going from a meeting about strategic planning for the next 5 years of the corporation, immediately into a meeting about some minor technical issue in a small project that has nothing to do with revenue, profit, or strategy. Both meetings take up an hour of your life, yet only one has an outsized impact on the direction of the organization.

Or worse, imagine going to a meeting that just says “Meeting” on the invite and you have zero clue about what is about to be discussed.

Here’s how to make your meetings suck less as an executive:

1. Batch meeting types - when you shift context from macro to micro, you can develop context fatigue, meaning it’s exhausting to go from thinking big to small and big again. So have big meetings on one day and small, detailed meetings on another day.
2. Don’t let people just ‘grab your time’ - you can allocate time blocks for meetings that people can fill, but not all day.
3. Require an agenda in the invitation - I decline meetings that don’t have an agenda, or if the agenda feels weak I’ll reply with “can this be an email?” It’s entirely up to me to determine if this meeting is worth my time, and if I don’t have enough information to decide, I assume it will be a waste of my time and so I decline it.
4. Format the agenda - A good meeting agenda should have a clear and well-communicated purpose, list detailed agenda items to be covered, and clearly identify the roles of each attendee for each item. Absent any of those things, I decline meetings until those are made clear to me.
5. No more 1-hour meetings - I prefer to schedule my meetings for either 30 minutes or 90 minutes. This forces people to choose a short or long meeting as opposed to just the default time block that I guess Microsoft decided on back in the 1980s? 30 minutes is enough time to discuss a decision, especially if everyone in the meeting has reviewed the information prior to the meeting. For brainstorming sessions that require lots of people to think through something important, I prefer to have more time and walk through a brainstorming process that takes longer.

Implementing these 5 rules will dramatically change your experience with meetings, and you’ll find yourself having a TON more time available in your day.

Side note: You can practice these tips even if you’re not an executive. You can have a conversation with your direct supervisor about the need to be more productive in ‘heads-down’ time, so you’re wanting to block of 3-4 hours a day at the same time that’s not available for meetings.

I went into a lot more detail about effective meetings in one of my YouTube videos below.

How to Run Meetings as an Executive

What are some of your meeting-hell experiences? Comment below with your best stories!

-tom