Opinion
We need to get out of ‘meeting hell’. Here’s how
Tim Duggan
Careers contributorIt’s good to admit when you’ve been wrong in the past, so here’s a confession from me: for many years I used to think that success was having a full work calendar packed with as many meetings as possible.
I believed that squeezing catch-ups into every hour of the day with people inside and outside my company was the best way of working. It made me feel productive and important until one day I realised it was actually having the opposite effect, and I was stuck in dreaded ‘meeting hell’.
Our obsession with endless meetings must stop somewhere.Credit: Adobe
This is a destination that’s sadly familiar to most office workers at some stage of their career. Meeting hell is a place where unnecessary or unproductive meetings fill your diary, wasting everyone’s time, and making minutes drag into long, drawn-out hours.
Don’t get me wrong here. Some meetings can be positive gatherings where like-minded people come together to plan, discuss and align on common goals. But they can also be complete hell.
The first thing to acknowledge is that we simply have too many of them. One particularly disturbing survey of 1900 American business leaders found that that workers in large organisations of 500 or more employees spent around 75 per cent of their time preparing, attending, leading or concluding meetings. Three quarters of their work time!
Another study by Microsoft showed the amount of time we spend in meetings has tripled since the start of COVID-19, when video-conferencing spread through workplaces as the new default mode for meetings.
You can get more of your workday back by simply cutting the length of your meetings in half.
This means we can now schedule entire days working from home or meetings rooms where we are dialled into other people’s homes or meeting rooms through the tiny green light on our computers.
Our obsession with endless meetings must stop somewhere, so how the hell do we get out of it? Well, there are several ways to break our addiction to meetings, ranging from large measures to small tweaks.
Starting with the biggest change first, one solution is reducing the number of meetings you have in your diary. An extreme way of doing this is to go cold turkey and declare ‘calendar bankruptcy’. This means deleting every re-occurring meeting that’s currently taking up space in your calendar so you can start all over again, adding each new one back in with clear, conscious intention.
If that’s too much, you can always work with your colleagues, department or entire company to determine a set time as ‘meeting-free’. It might be a regular afternoon or one day a week when no meetings are allowed to be scheduled.
This easy move can have an immediate effect in freeing time up in your life and giving you space to think deeper and more creatively about solutions to your work.
Another simpler approach is to improve your existing meetings. If a meeting is absolutely necessary, you can avoid some of the usual traps with a few simple rules, like always having an agenda, ensuring there’s an organiser who runs the meeting and documenting what the next steps are at the end.
Lastly, you can get more of your workday back by simply cutting the length of your meetings in half. One of the key culprits here is Parkinson’s Law, a term inspired by British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson. “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” he wrote in 1955.
Meetings follow the same rules. If you book a meeting for one hour, you will generally take up all that time. The reverse also holds true, so if you schedule a meeting for 15 or 20 minutes, you’d be surprised at how quickly you can resolve most of the key items in the shortened allocated time.
Meeting hell is a terrible place where you don’t want to be. But by making a few simple changes you can spend less time talking about all the work you need to do, and more time actually doing it.
Tim Duggan’s new book, Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better, is out now. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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