The Meetings' Roller Coaster
A go-to guide to hell
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
What to do if we have too many meetings? This is a fundamental question especially depending on one’s scope and ongoing projects. I had the idea for this post while checking my calendar one week, and counted around 40 meetings scheduled across 4 days’ week (since one day was a public holiday).
Of course, this is an overwhelming amount of calls and nothing can be done productively. This can happen to any kind of manager so it’s important to have a grasp on the calendar. For that reason, I’ll share some of my tips and tricks to control the calendar a bit better.
Instruct people to respect your calendar and use Outlook’s assistant features
Every time someone schedules a call on a timeslot already occupied, feel free to kindly refuse and provide instructions on how to check your availability. It is surprising the number of people who simply do guesswork on how to propose meeting schedules and don’t know features like Outlook’s assistant.
This is especially true for technical staff since their calendar is set to a monthly view. Their calendar is optimized for having a glimpse of their only 2 scheduled calls, aside from the daily, and complaint about the number of meetings they have.
25 min calls are the magic
By default, I try to schedule 25-minute meetings and try for everyone to be punctual and respect the timeframe. More than 25 minutes is an online coffee break mixed with a work agenda. After a while, I started noticing that colleagues who schedule 1-hour meetings by default, tend to organize podcasts instead of productive gatherings.
Blocking timeslots on the calendar to do actual work
This might be a game changer if your calendar starts the suffer a beating from everyone. People have their priorities and Superman is only available for Lois Lane and saving the world within DC comics. So they might turn on you to help and contribute to whatever priorities they have. You also have priorities that need actual work. For that reason, I block periods in the calendar to do the work I find valuable for my goals.
For example, in a week where I have crucial and pivotal presentations about a project, and I need to review work and prepare the deck, I block periods in the calendar throughout the week. I would refuse any meeting that drops on those periods, and force the rescheduling of those meetings to be outside my daily prime or more productive hours. The question I ask myself is: Does the topic of this meeting have more or less priority than the work I am scheduled to produce? More often than not, my scheduled work has more priority, so I kindly ask the organizer to reschedule.
Lack of available hours. What to do?
In peak periods the meetings start to aggregate in the calendar and the question is: Which meetings do I need to attend? Can it be delegated? If I am in a meeting and I don’t say anything, clearly I am spending my time poorly. Will I be a useful contributor to that meeting?
Feel free to challenge the status quo of that meeting and propose changes to the timeslot, participants, or whatever that you feel would be useful. Even asking for an agenda can force some people to work through the invitation and make the meeting more productive.
I have stepped on toes because I bluntly refused meeting invitations and I continue to do it. Some organizations have the unfortunate mentality to put a lot of people who are not needed in a meeting to find a savior for a problem that nobody in a call understands. So if I am challenged to go to a specific meeting, I challenge back with the utility of my presence and the proper homework done before the call.
In practice, I prioritize my meetings, I try to have the cleanest calendar, and I would join only the calls I truly provide value.
Your time is precious.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur