Escaping the Corporate Hell of Too Many Meetings
The typical work calendar 🧩 Our brains with back-to-back meetings all day 🧩 The cost and value of meetings 🧩 How to unclutter our calendars
You look at your calendar and it’s a mess! On top of having too many things to do, you also have too many meetings to attend, they take up all of your days, you’re even double- and triple-booked at times. And while you’re trying to at least resolve the scheduling conflicts, more meeting invites appear for those same times. Of course, everything is urgent and of the highest priority, and everyone wants you and no one else.
How do you remain sane and deal with all this?
Keep reading 👇
📆 The Typical Work Calendar
The screenshots below are a real-life example extracted from the calendar of a Software Development employee:
Unfortunately, this example is not specific to the particular person, company, or even industry. Nowadays, pretty much everyone in any industry has back-to-back meetings every day.
Notice that the person is not only double-, but also triple-, and even quadruple-booked at times (when we include the all-day meeting). So here’s what I’m wondering:
If a person is booked for two or more meetings at the same time, how do they know which one to attend? Maybe one meeting has a higher priority, or maybe the person is more needed in another, etc. There are no decision-making criteria - it’s all left to the individual to figure out.
Even more importantly, if a person is fully booked for the whole workday, at which point do they get to do the tasks they were hired to do (which should also be the tasks that are presumably inputs to or outputs from those meetings)?
What is the value these meetings bring to the business? We can calculate how much they cost, apart from the psychological impact of disruption, context-switching, etc., which is very hard to put into numbers. However, can we estimate the value-add?
Is there a way to improve the meeting format, minimize their number, or eliminate them altogether? And (keeping pt.3 in mind) what would that look like?
🥴 Meeting Fatigue
What’s happening to our brains when we have back-to-back meetings all day?
Microsoft has done a lot of ongoing research on the trends shaping our “future of work”. One study involved 14 volunteers who wore EEG caps during their workday at the office. The caps measured the brain’s beta wave activity (i.e. associated with stress) as the research participants attended their meetings.
The research showed three main takeaways:
Breaks between meetings allow the brain to “reset,” reducing a cumulative buildup of stress across meetings.
Back-to-back meetings can decrease our ability to focus and engage.
Transitioning between meetings can be a source of high stress (mainly because there’s no break in between).
Things are not much different with video calls / online meetings: Another study by Microsoft found that signs of overwork and stress in the brain are much higher during video meetings than when doing non-meeting tasks like writing emails. Additionally, because of the intense focus needed, we start feeling tired after 30-40 minutes in a meeting. On days filled with video calls, stress starts building up after about two hours into the day.
The research suggests that several things cause meeting fatigue:
having to focus on the screen for a long time to get important information and stay involved;
not being able to see body language that helps you understand what others are thinking or when it’s your turn to talk; and
screen sharing that limits how much you can see the people you're talking to.
⚖️ Value vs. Cost of Meetings
The value and cost of meetings are typically estimated in return on investment (ROI) vs. participants’ salaries or rates per hour, respectively. However, there are other, less tangible, but more significant value and cost of meetings:
Why are meetings really needed?
We are all social beings, and our colleagues are a big part of our social circle. Meetings help us keep the human connection.
Collaboration that we establish with our colleagues in real life transfers to our virtual ways of working. The opposite, however, is not true.
In complicated and/or urgent issues with lots of dependencies, we can get everyone’s perspective and reach a decision faster (but the quality of that decision will be pretty low if we’re already experiencing meeting fatigue).
What is the real price we pay for (back-to-back) meetings?
Meetings cause all types of disruption on a personal and psychological level:
cognitive overload because of constant context-switching;
loss of focus due to meeting fatigue;
no time to think the topics through and provide adequate responses, which lowers the quality of decisions made;
workday fully occupied and no time for other tasks, which lowers productivity;
stress and anxiety built up, due to all of the above.
Meetings are, in fact, not as productive as we’d like to think. Not everyone can attend them (due to different timezones or other engagements), not everyone can contribute (because some people are naturally more dominant than others), and no one has much time to think about the issues discussed at the meeting.
There is a certain social punishment involved if we’re not constantly connected and available at all times - online and offline/in-person. If we disconnect, discussions will move on before we have a chance to respond or even see them. Eventually, we’ll get excluded from the social circle. Therefore, we try to be everywhere all the time, which hurts our productivity and mental health. This type of culture prioritizes networking over results and personal well-being - meaning, it becomes highly political in nature.
🧹 Uncluttering the Calendar
There are certain steps we can take as individuals, or as an organization, to ease the business and personal pressure of constant meetings. Here are some suggestions:
Which meetings to attend?
All meetings ultimately fall into two categories:
Decision-making: They address a problem and come up with a solution. Therefore, these types of meetings always have next steps.
Knowledge-sharing: They can be introductions, syncs, status updates, reporting, brainstorming, collaborating, etc. These types of meetings usually don’t have next steps (unless they turn into decision-making at some point).
✴️ The basic rule is that we don’t necessarily need a meeting for knowledge-sharing. That can be done in multiple other ways. However, we do need a meeting for decision-making. It’s simply easier and faster if we get everyone’s perspective and buy-in in one go.
Who should attend a meeting?
Imagine a football team (i.e. soccer, for those in the U.S.):
We have football players from both teams, which are highly interested in playing the game. They are also the ones with the highest influence on how the specific match is played and what the end result will be.
We have referees, who can also influence the match a lot because they are the ones enforcing the rules. However, their interest in the specific match is not as high as that of the players - they are more interested in and set the stage for the game itself.
We also have the audience. They are very interested in the game and the specific match - as much as the players. However, unlike the players and the referees, they have little to no influence over the game/match.
We also have the general public. They are neither interested in the game/match, nor do they have any influence over it. However, individuals from the public might move to any other box at any time.
✴️ From this Stakeholder Matrix, we can extract the following rules:
As already mentioned before, we need meetings only when we want to collaborate with, consult, and get the buy-in for a decision we’re making. Therefore, the people we have to invite are either players or referees (i.e. those with big influence over the decision).
The reverse is just as true: If we’re not making or influencing a decision - i.e. if we’re not a player or a referee in someone else’s game - we shouldn’t attend the meeting. (To know that, though, the meeting invite must contain a clear agenda and goal.)
We can certainly keep the audience involved and the public informed, but, again, meetings are not needed for knowledge-sharing.
✴️ Additionally, there’s a limit of participants we want to observe to avoid groupthink - a phenomenon that occurs when a group’s desire for consensus hinders open debate, disagreement, or critique. We can use Amazon’s 2-pizza rule: If the people at our meeting can’t be fed with two pizzas, we’re too many.
How to prioritize when there’s a scheduling conflict?
Meetings are essentially tasks we have to do, therefore we can use Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix for prioritizing tasks:
✴️ The rule here is that we only attend the important meetings:
If the matter is important and urgent, we schedule/attend the meeting right away.
If the matter is important but not urgent, we schedule the meeting for later. Note that if we schedule too far ahead, we run the risk of perceiving the matter as unimportant when the time comes (that might even be true, but it needs a re-evaluation).
The unimportant meetings don’t require our involvement:
If the matter is unimportant but urgent, we delegate it. Note that, to delegate an urgent task, we must have already established a radically transparent way of working, so that the delegate can pick up and execute the task without issues.
If the matter is neither important nor urgent, we delete it from our (and everybody else’s) to-do list.
How to politely decline a meeting?
The majority of us find it difficult to say “no”, but uncluttering our calendars will require us to say “no” to quite a few meeting requests. It’s critical to realize that we cannot attend to everything. To be able to join the meetings that matter the most, we must decline the rest. There are certain expectations for us and for what we need to deliver. Therefore, we’re not declining because we’re bad people; we’re declining because we’re responsible people.
✴️ That said, declining with grace takes practice. However, the best approach is to be honest about our needs, feelings, and thoughts. The majority of people will respect and understand that. And the ones who don’t - well, then we have bigger problems working with them than skipping/canceling a meeting.
Other things to consider:
✴️ If we’re saying “yes” just to be polite or because of fear of repercussions, then that’s really a “no”.
✴️ Any meeting scheduled a few weeks from now (just because our calendars are free then) should be an automatic “no”. We will have different priorities then that we’ll want to address and we need our calendars to be free for those. When booking or agreeing to a meeting, imagine it will take place tomorrow morning - will it still be a “yes”?
✴️ Meetings without an agenda and a clear goal/purpose should be an automatic “no”. We need this information to decide if we even have to be in the meeting and, if yes, to prepare for it accordingly.
✴️ Meetings that are scheduled for the same day (or at the end of the day for the beginning of the next business day) should be an automatic “no”. We need at least a 24-hour notice to not only adjust our schedules, but prepare for the meeting accordingly.
“Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.” — Bob Carter
✴️ We can ask for some materials to review before the meeting (or instead). That way, we can provide our feedback asynchronously and skip the meeting altogether.
What are some additional rules around scheduling?
✴️ Our daily maximum for meetings booked should not be 100% of our total availability, but 80% at most. We must leave ourselves some time to maneuver in case anything unexpected (whether personal or professional) pops up at the last moment.
✴️ No back-to-back meetings. We must leave ourselves some breathing space between meetings to relax, switch focus, and avoid meeting fatigue. To achieve that, we can book ourselves for 15-20 minutes (or even 30 minutes, depending on our company meeting culture) right before or after each meeting.
✴️ We can book ourselves for breaks (e.g. lunch) or longer tasks that require uninterrupted focus time. The goal is to put everything we have to do in the course of the day in one calendar. We can use a tool like Nautilus for a simplified view.
What are some meeting alternatives or different formats?
✴️ If our feedback is not sensitive, we don’t need a meeting to deliver it. We can leave comments in a document/webpage, or even better: record an audio or a video message (e.g. via Loom) and send it over. The audio captures our tone of voice, which is lost in written text, and the video shows our body language too - thus, minimizing any possible misunderstanding.
✴️ We can use a trick from Amazon - they have banned all presentations. Meetings start with memos, which are text documents, with full sentences, telling the background story. Everyone has 30 minutes to read the memo and think about the problem, after which discussion begins.
✴️ Agile has its famous Daily Standups - and people indeed stand up during those meetings. Here’s a funny take on how we can experiment with body postures to make meetings even more productive:
✴️ If we’ll be standing up, we might as well go outside and walk - especially if it’s a 1:1 meeting and the weather is nice. Walking boosts brain activity and, thus, we come up with more innovative ideas. (We can use this trick if we’re stuck with a problem we cannot resolve - we leave it for a little while and go outside to take a walk without any mobile phone distractions. We just let our thoughts wander, and the solution will appear as if out of nowhere.)
✴️ Another interesting way to hold meetings is presented by Holacracy. It’s a rather heavy process, with roles and responsibilities, on who does what during the meeting, and what type of meetings are required in general. As you can tell, I’m skeptical about it, but if we follow it to the letter, it apparently works.
How to make a company-wide cultural shift to fewer meetings?
As an organization, we can set specific hours in the day or days in the week that are meeting-free. However, companies like Atlassian, GitLab, Remote, Doist, etc. have gone a step further and implemented asynchronous working (also known as asynchronous collaboration, asynchronous communication, or async for short).
Synchronous work means it’s done at the same time. Asynchronous, therefore, means it’s not done at the same time. Async describes an organizational culture where communication is slower, well thought out, and intentional. Async collaboration has various forms, each with its specific reasons, and the goal is to cause as little disruption to work (and life!) as possible. The focus is on performance, rather than on meetings - i.e. on working together, rather than on being together.
“Over my years at Doist, I’ve come to realize that team culture and human connection is primarily built by how you work together - not how you socialize together.” — Chase Warrington
Asynchronous working is a natural byproduct of remote working. And while we can have an async culture without remote working, it’s pretty hard to have a well-functioning remote working without an async culture (and without radical transparency).
What are the benefits of asynchronous working?
We establish flexibility and control over our workday. This makes us happier and more productive.
Not being able to ping people at any time and expect an immediate response leads to better planning. This in turn causes less stress and anxiety.
Communication becomes slower but of higher quality.
Ongoing discussions are reviewed as possible (e.g. around twice per day), not as needed. Thus, interruptions are eliminated and deep focus is enabled.
Increased documentation means greater transparency. Minutes of meetings become automatic.
Remotely working employees are not treated as second-hand citizens anymore. All company employees are placed on equal footing.
Collaboration across time zones becomes effortless. This leads to better diversity and inclusion. It also opens up a bigger talent pool for our organizations.
✴️ How to establish asynchronous working in the organization?
We have to ensure everyone has access to all tools, documents, and materials (otherwise, waiting for access to be granted for 1-2 days kind of kills the idea).
We shift to evaluating people based on their output and results, not on how responsive they are or the number of hours they work.
We abolish required work hours or the mandate to come to an office.
We set reasonable, organization-wide expectations for acceptable response times.
We create a communication channel for emergencies (which should only be used for emergencies - that is to say, a few times per year).
Additionally, we may consider removing from our mobile phones:
all work apps, and
all notifications.
Note that a well-working async culture is a constant balance between two clashing ideas:
→ Synchronous communication should be the exception, not the rule.
AND
→ Async-first doesn't mean async-only.
Which meetings to keep?
As already mentioned before, humans are social beings. Therefore, we don’t want to eliminate all meetings because that will also eliminate any chance for a human connection.
✴️ The rule of thumb is:
5% offline/in-person meetings
25% online meetings
70% async work
✴️ Additionally, we can define in a company policy what type of communication should be in what form. The guideline can be that online or in-person meetings are allowed when one of the following is true:
We want to build rapport.
We need to provide critical feedback or discuss other sensitive topics.
We have a lot of unknowns and we want to brainstorm different ideas and solutions.
There are a lot of dependencies and we want to bring everyone on the same page quickly.
There is a crisis that requires immediate attention. (As already mentioned, we can have a dedicated emergency channel for such situations, given that it’s not used more than 3-5 times a year.)
Examples:
In-person meeting: going to a co-working space and meeting people from other companies (the organization can reimburse the costs); other social initiatives, like colleagues meeting for coffee, dinner, or entertainment anywhere in the world (also sponsored by the company); company retreats once or twice a year to get everyone offside for team-building, but also to rethink the organizational ways of working; etc.
Online meeting: urgent topics (because async is slow by default); complicated issues (with multiple dependencies); sensitive, emotionally charged conversations, such as personal feedback; regular 1:1s with the manager; casual hangouts for 1:1 coffee breaks; longer hangouts for people from the same or different teams to chat about anything non-work related; etc.
Async: collaboration with colleagues; brainstorming; regular information-sharing from manager to team; regular team/project sync; etc.
And that’s how we escape the corporate hell of back-to-back meetings all day. And in doing so, we create a more productive, flexible, stress-free, and socially inclusive environment for everyone.
Thank you for reading 💝
Till next time,
Irina
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