How to attend fewer meetings and actually feel good about it

How many meetings do you attend in a day? If it’s anything like a typical Project Manager, they are buttressed right up against each other in your diary system of choice with nary a gap for eating, or even “doing”. It’s got so bad, that I’ve even seen Project Managers schedule bathroom breaks in their diary otherwise they fear they won’t even have time for that!

We’ve even been told that this is how it should be. We have been told that “producers” need long periods of uninterrupted time to produce - think software engineers, creatives, or even your builder… they wouldn’t get much done if they were in meetings all the time. And then we’re told that “orchestrators” need lots of meetings to understand what the producers are doing and to steer the ship. An orchestrator - think CEO, department head, or Project Manager - is connecting the threads between many producers and needs all the meetings to keep abreast of the variety they are responsible for.

What if this conventional wisdom is wrong?

What would you do if you only had half as many meetings in your diary? My guess is that you would do things in the system of the project that would likely make the project more successful. Maybe you’d do a deep dive on the dependency chain and work out how to re-prioritise it for better value, or speed, or cost. Maybe you’d think deeper about some real issues or risks and come up with creative solutions. Maybe you would focus on what work was happening that was not necessary to achieve the project outcomes and you would reduce the effort needed in the project.

All of these add value.

So here’s the question. Does you attending the meeting add as much value as doing the things you would do if you didn’t need to attend the meeting? It’s not an easy answer and it’s nuanced. It’s probably better you still attend the meetings. Just in case.

But what if we asked a different question, a better question. What would need to happen so that you didn’t need to attend the meeting?

Dissecting your role at the meeting

In order to answer the question, you have to have a good understanding of your role at the meeting. If it’s a one on one with one of your direct reports, you probably play a pretty fundamental role in that. But if it’s the engineering team getting together to work out their priorities for the next sprint, or how to resolve a technical challenge, your role there is different.

I’m not disputing that you add value at those meetings. But I think you can add the same value, differently, and for less time commitment.

If the engineering team are resolving a technical challenge, you can kick off the meeting - make sure everyone understands the challenge and make sure everyone knows what a good solution looks like (what parameters need to be hit for the solution to be considered “good” - cost, time, impact to other work, the outcomes that need to be true, etc). When the meeting is kicked off, your value in staying there is really (i) ego (ii) being nosy (iii) policing - making sure the solution meets the parameters.

Still not convinced, try this trick

There’s an easy way to validate your meeting contribution to see if it’s a meeting you can skip in the future.

Take a piece of paper and draw a timeline on it in 5 minute bands. Every 5 minutes, record 3 things.

1. How many questions were you asked in the last 5 minutes?

2. How many times in the last 5 minutes did people need direction from you?

3. How many times in the last 5 minutes did you need to share information that the team didn’t know?

You can keep these as a tally chart. My guess, for lots of meetings the numbers are really low. Even when you do have numbers, they are front-loaded to the start of the meeting.

Doing this will make you realise that you really can attend fewer meetings and starting adding different value to your project.