Five lessons I have learnt from 889 hours of meetings in the last 2 years.

Forget all the memes about pointless meetings and zero in on how you spend your time, you start to see a pattern emerge. I put my analytical skills to work recently and made some “discoveries” and also got some lessons I want to pass on from the last 24 months.

Let’s first see what the raw numbers say. (I am reviewing data from 01 April 2022 to 31 March 2023 compared to the same period last year).

Over the last year alone, meetings lasting more than an hour increased by +235% and also made up a big proportion of my overall meetings at 24%, up from 9% previously.

The impact of meetings on productivity is a critical aspect for leaders to understand and analyze, just as much as the bottom line because, in the end, it affects more than just productivity. It correlates with stress, engagement and satisfaction of team members.

Corporate Rebels undertook its over research over a 14-month period which concluded that we essentially waste a lot of time at work with meetings. Check that out here.

In terms of spread across a work week, each day of the week saw a rise in meetings. In fact, I spent 27% of all my productive annual work hours in meetings, up from 20% the year before.

Lastly, the time when these meetings took place. No surprise, they are pretty front loaded with 49% of all the meetings happening in the mornings, up from 42% the year before. The slim ray of right is the 45% reduction in meetings scheduled after 5pm.

Now that we have the insights out of the way, here comes the lessons!

First lesson: The longer the meeting, the lower the value. This is in cadence with the law of diminishing returns.

Over the last 2 years, I have learnt that nothing new or good comes from a 2 hour meeting that couldn’t have been done in a 30 minute meeting. In fact, the strain and stress of a longer meeting creates the inverse of efficiency and productivity.

Second lesson: Shorter meetings create the need for urgency, clarity and conciseness. These are the pillars of effective communication. Most meetings drag on because it turns into a time filling exercise rather than a tool to have clear, concise and necessary communication or alignment.

Some of the best meetings I have had were ironically not meetings in any sense of the word.??

Third lesson: Preparation, preparation, preparation! A few years ago, I had a standing department meeting that would go for an hour and a half. These days, we have this meeting for under an hour. Sometimes, it is just 45 minutes.

This is down to a key element, preparation. The meeting notes, insights and documents are prepared ahead of time and shared with the attendees. We use the meeting minutes to critique and prep for execution upon which we shall review the following week.

Occasionally, we indulge in Any other Business and entertain new information that is critical to our decision making and execution but when the path before us is clear, we usually just stick to the insights gathered from Power B.I & Data Studio.?

Fourth lesson: Keep people informed, not involved, unless absolutely necessary. To borrow from Brooks’ law, an incremental person when added to a project (or a meeting in this case) makes it take more, not less time.

This is an important observation on the line of communication and team sizes. The same goes for a meeting. If a team has 3 people, it requires 3 lines of communication. If it grows to 4 people, the lines of communication grow to 6. At 5 people, the lines of communication are 10.

To avoid this counterproductive problem, focus on clusters (smaller teams, smaller meetings), keep the information structured and free flowing. I have been part of extremely large meetings where I nodded off & simply felt like excess to the requirements.

There is a difference between keeping people informed and involved. Sometimes, all that is needed is the information.?

Fifth lesson: Meetings are not actual work, even though they are made to feel so!?

The number of meetings I had scheduled and attended jumped 26% year on year while the time spent (in hours) increased by 36%. My actual performance in relation to my KPIs only improved by 9% according to the data I collected from Leapsome for the same period.

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These observations have made me more aware of how and where I spend my time. This also reinforces the need to have a new skill developed, meeting management, across several teams.

Having identified meetings as the conspicuous time wasters of my most productive time, I recommend the following steps to curb them down;

• Have a clear purpose for the meeting: The joke is that most meetings could be an email or phone call. That is true however, some projects, tasks and information may be best presented in a meeting. The key is to have a clear purpose and once that purpose is over, that meeting should be discontinued.
• Preparation, preparation, preparation: The easiest way to ascertain whether you require a meeting or not is by understanding the level of preparation. If you’re not prepared or sure of what to do during the meeting, just don’t have one anyway and figure it out during the meeting. The exception is on brainstorming sessions but even with these, some level of preparation is required to ensure that the entire meeting is not a giant time waster!
• Keep it small: This goes back to lesson 4. Your preparation allows you to know what people you need in your meeting. It is critical that you share the meeting insights with any other person who needs to be informed of the progress rather than dragging them into a 2-hour snooze fest!
• Keep it short & focused: I already mentioned this in lessons 1 & 2, shorter meetings deliver a level of conciseness that I think is very important for effective communication and productivity. Don’t say more than you need to or overindulge in off-topic subjects.
• Have a Q&A for clarification: Concise meetings require higher levels of concentration and to make sure each attendee understands, have a Q&A to make sure there is clarification before tasks are handed out.
• Assign roles & follow up tasks: This ties-up the meeting and establishes if there will be a need for another such meeting for accountability. The best way is to create a channel of communication between the attendees that allows them to update each other on progress rather than create a series of (pointless) meetings on the same issue.