#DeathToMeetings: My 5 Commitments, and Why You Should Change Too

“At first you feel special. ‘Wow – they’re including me. I must be special if I’m invited to this meeting.’ Then slowly it starts to hit you that every second in a meeting is a second you can’t build the meaningful shit you joined the company to build. Then, you look at your schedule and realize your next month looks like this. And quickly those dreams on day one go to die as you dream up schemes to skip the meeting instead of creating cool shit.”

These were the words from a recent millennial hire on my team. They were raw, honest words that reflected my own thoughts on the need to refresh, transform, and reclaim time. The number one thing that people struggle with in the workplace is time. Time to get work done. Time to retrain and reskill. And the data is clear that the number one thing eating that time is meetings.

The incoming workforce wasn’t raised with meetings. They were raised with instant gratification. Facebook. YouTube. Google. Information is always just a click away. They expect this with work. Not because they feel entitled, but because they’re passionate about making real change. They want to build cool shit and see their shit make an impact. Sitting through an hour of slide decks for something that could’ve been a five-minute read in email is time lost toward impact. It kills progress. It enables persistence of the things that need to change.

An Expensive and Irrational Investment

If the cost of slowed progress isn’t jarring enough for you, consider the bottom line. Bain & Company studied large corporation time budgeting and found that a weekly midlevel manager meeting cost one organization over $15 million each year. That’s just one meeting a week.

Although the meetings you attend may not cost that much, they do incur cost. For example, each one hour meeting with a five-person team making an average of $100K per year costs $350. If the team averages 15 hours of meetings each week, the weekly cost of meetings is $5,250.

That’s $273K annually for just five people. Imagine when you multiply that out for your entire company. For a 100-person company, that’s $5.5M annually. To continue a work habit that kills progress toward meaningful change. It makes no sense.

Finding a way to reduce the number and/or length of meetings can provide a huge savings to your company. Curious how much? The Harvard Business Review has a great cost calculator that can help you quickly put a price tag on your time. From where I’m sitting, the value of that investment isn’t there.

All the Experts Agree

What amazes me the most is how much signal we’re getting when it comes to the time being wasted in meetings. We hear it from studies, leaders, and front-line workers.

Executives spend approximately 23 hours a week in meetings, compared to just 10 hours a week in the 1960s, and a mere 17% feel that those meetings are a productive use of time. Considering all of the digital tools we have today that are supposed to help us work more efficiently and remotely, these numbers are pretty shocking. In fact, most execs in the Bain & Company study feel that meetings are ineffective, interfere with work, lack deep thinking, and actually prevent teams from working closely together.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that there are simply too many meetings, especially among senior level employees. He states, “You don’t need to have pre-meetings for essentially what is going to be a discussion.”

His recommendation? Stop reviewing with everyone in the matrix before doing the review for the senior executive. That alone will have a huge impact on time and money saved.

Elon Musk sent out tips to his Tesla employees on productivity. This list weighed heavily on the side of limited meetings. His suggestions for reducing the time spent in meetings include:

• Leave meetings in which you cannot add value
• Don’t use vocabulary and acronyms that make communication difficult
• Don’t use the chain of command for communication – use the shortest path
• Enable free flow of information between levels and departments
• Use common sense, especially if a company rule doesn’t apply to your particular situation

Front line workers are begging for limited meetings. Whether in high tech fields or retail, workers are overwhelmed by the number and length of meetings. This includes traditional meetings as well as electronic meetings.

What are people saying? 

Why are we not listening?

Gig Mindset: My Path To Meeting-Free Collaboration

Gig Mindset n. The inclination for people and organizations to engage on-demand expert intelligence to reclaim time, drive innovation, and rethink what’s possible. 

Working with freelancers is changing how I think about collaboration. Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a project and asked a freelancer if she had time for a call to discuss an issue we were working through.

It would be easier to just talk on the phone, and she could scope the changes, right?

It might’ve been easier for me, but it wasn’t at all easier for her. She was slammed, so instead of slowing down and waiting for her to have the time to communicate my way, I pulled together a quick design brief of the idea to get my thoughts together and sent it over. We kept moving, and I learned new skills. No meeting needed. Less time, less disruption, and a better outcome.

It can be hard for gig workers to provide this type of feedback because freelancing is a volatile and dynamic environment. I’m glad this freelancer felt comfortable pushing back on my request. I would much rather have honest and open collaboration, than have a freelancer I’m working with just go dark because I’m asking too much of them.

By applying a gig mindset and thinking in terms of what information this freelancer needed to be able to accomplish this task, I learned different ways of capturing and communicating ideas. Ways that enabled us to avoid a meeting, be respectful of each other’s time, and make faster progress.

I recently had to answer a compliance question when working with freelancers on Upwork.

It’s ironic that one of the things we have to commit to when working with freelancers is not having meetings. One of the perks of being a gig worker is that there are fewer (if any) meetings.

The challenge is now that I have a new way of working, I still have to adapt to the traditional structure and constructs of how my broader team works. It is important for me to find the right balance between evolution and revolution (albeit, I like revolutions more!). I found myself complaining about the number of meetings and kept thinking that there must be something we can do about it. The more I thought about it, there was: I needed to be the change I wanted to see in the world.

#DeathToMeetings: 5 Things I Commit to Do This Year

To be the change means that I’m putting a stake in the ground this year. I will walk the line of evolution and revolution.

When meetings are necessary, I’ll follow the best practices outlined in countless lists: Start on time, have a clear agenda, ensure the right people are invited.

But this year, I’m learning from freelancers and evolving with the Gig Mindset. I’m going one step further and will work to reduce the number of meetings that I attend or ask to be held. Here are five commitments that I am going to start holding myself accountable to. I am writing this publicly so that others may encourage me to walk the talk. 

1. Confirm we need structured time. I will spend time working with the team to decide if we really need a meeting. Before setting up a meeting, I will always ask if the structured time is really needed and if there is a better way to accomplish the desired outcome. As I put the Gig Mindset into practice, I find myself breaking things down into smaller tasks. This taskification doesn’t lend itself to monolithic meetings. I will do everything in my power to avoid pulling people into a meeting room. If we absolutely have to meet, I’ll limit it to 30 minutes with a solid agenda and clear outcome. I’ll follow two pieces of advice from Jeff Bezos: the two pizza rule (meetings shouldn’t be so big that two pizzas wouldn’t feed everyone in the room) and no end-of-day meetings (10 a.m. is the magical time).

2. Work in the open. I will focus on increasing transparency by working in the open. This will create more fluid conversations, enable faster innovation, and produce better quality projects. I will also do this by moving ALL of my project-based work to Microsoft Teams and Planner and ensure that all communication is transparent and in the open. We will leverage collaboration tools to form ideas and get things written down before proposing a structured meeting. While the goal is to increase the pace of innovation and empower the team, it will also serve to reduce the need for as many structured meetings.

3. Embrace the modern water cooler – I will spend more time on spontaneous conversations about important projects, personal passions, and things that may seem random but often unlock innovation. Over time I will work to move some of these conversations in our Teams chat channel to drive engagement in the conversation. I will increase my engagement with other thought leaders on LinkedIn, which has increasingly become a virtual meeting place for conversation. I will encourage more productive conversations by moving strategy discussions out of the settings where operational work is performed. It’s critical for me to ensure I get a diversity of thought and interaction from people “outside of the bubble.” In my experience, taking a walk or grabbing coffee to discuss strategy leads to more productive and active conversations, which then helps push concepts forward without more meetings.

4. Write things down. I will take time to deeply think through my ideas and write things down as we work to make progress on various strategies and projects. I’m impressed with Amazon’s strategy of requiring teams to write six-page narrative papers on ideas. It requires deep thinking and forces team collaboration and consensus. And there are no slides! The number of times I’ve pinged someone for info and been told “it would be easier to get on a call” is insane. As I referenced in my experience with asking to jump on a call with a freelancer, I was just being lazy and I needed to do some work to get my thoughts together. Writing things down helps clear your mind and clarify your goals, priorities, and intentions. This will be a growth area for me, and I am dedicated to making progress!

5. Learn to say “No.” Due to my insatiable curiosity, the hardest thing for me to do is say no. This is partly for FOMO and partly due to my belief that I may be missing a learning opportunity. I will be more deliberate with my time and work with colleagues to really understand where I can provide value to any meeting. I will also decline meetings where I cannot provide value. 

The data is telling us to change, our leaders are pushing us to change, and we want change. These are my commitments to improving the efficiency of my time and respecting the time of those around me. Time is the most precious nonrenewable resource we have, and I want to ensure that it is spent in pursuit of empowering others, refreshing myself, and achieving more personally and professionally.

If you work with me and see me straying from these commitments, please tell me. If you have ideas that support my efforts, please share them, I’d love your insights. And, most importantly, if you want to change your habits to reclaim time, redirect cost, and empower people to build meaningful shit, please join me. Post your commitments. Share your stories. #DeathToMeetings

More from Paul

The Gig Mindset: My #HitRefresh Moment

Reskill or Die: Why your future depends on it

AI is taking over my life and it is not all bad, at least right now…

Gig Mindset: How I reclaimed 8 days this year (plus 50 task ideas so you can too!)

About the Author

Paul Estes is a passionate advocate for the gig economy, also known as the “Freelance/Sharing/On-demand economy.” In this new way of working, individuals and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term projects and services. Some estimates predict that by 2020, over 40% of the workforce will be engaged in alternative work arrangements, and the implications for our future are profound. Paul is on a mission to show how individuals and companies can take advantage of gig workers to grow themselves and increase their productivity. He leads a cross-disciplinary team at Microsoft that is enabling gig work company-wide, he shares his story as a speaker and panelist at conferences, and he is an active member of the Enterprise Customer Advisory Board for Upwork.