Take a Risk, Decline a Meeting

The madness of meetings is real people! Back-to-back, over lunch, even overlapping, with no time to even go to the bathroom. You might even think that your job is to be a professional meeting goer.

We keep hearing meetings have overtaken everyone’s schedule: things are moving fast and we have to stay aligned and connected. But how much faster could things move if we didn’t have to listen to hours and hours of “keeping you in the loop” messages.

The truth is…the calendar is owning us, instead of us owning our calendars. We accept meetings because we think we have to…but we don’t.

Leadership is taking ownership of your goals and ensuring you spend your time and energy to achieve them.

You can't execute on your goals if you are spending your days in back-to-back meetings.

Lately, several clients have taken huge risks in tackling their calendar overload. For one week, they have attempted to do it differently. We can report that some have gotten their hands slapped (but survived), none got fired, and many have changed their lives forever!

Here are some of the experiments our clients have tried for just one week:

• Decline every meeting scheduled over lunch: This client reports most people pick up the phone with a 5 mins discussion or they move the meeting out a week to a more appropriate time.
• Decline 20% of meetings on Sunday night: This client reviewed their calendar on Sunday night, prioritized meetings, and declined 20%. They replaced these meetings with blocks on their calendars. Yes, one person called and insisted they attend…but that was just one person. Win!
• Find a meeting buddy: Identify someone who is in most of the same meetings as you. Our client found someone who they saw frequently throughout the day, and sometimes even walked from meeting to meeting with. Those two leaders decided to tag team meetings instead. They scheduled a 30 minute meeting on Friday for the two of them to review the next week’s list of meetings. They divided their common meetings up so only one of them attended at a time. The following Friday that same 30 minutes was spent sharing meeting notes and dividing up the next week of meetings.

We can’t guarantee that these tactics work in every organization. But why not try for a week and see? Or maybe get your bosses perspective before you try by sharing this article with them?