Warning:  I’m going to have a bit of a rant…

Now that most business have returned to a ‘normal’ level of work, albeit partly from home now, the number of meetings going on seems to have risen alarmingly.

In recent weeks I’ve had several clients and contacts confide in me their stress at having days of back-to-back meetings, sometimes starting very early in the morning and going on well into the evening.

To make it worse, for some of these people all the meetings are ‘on screen’.

Electronic meetings scheduled in electronic calendars. We love our technology, don’t we? Well, we think we do, until we’re staring, gritty-eyed at the seventh on-screen meeting of the day, dying for a cup of tea or a ‘comfort break’ and wondering whether those emails that keep popping in are going to extend the day past all reasonable hours.

Sound familiar?

[Here comes the rant…]

All these problems could be avoided if everyone (that includes you) broke a few bad habits:

Bad habit #1 – assuming that a meeting must be 60 minutes or 30 minutes

This is the root cause of the ‘back-to-back meetings’ headache.  You agree to a meeting at 9am and it goes into your calendar from 9am to 10am. The tech obligingly does that for you – so you don’t need to think about how long the meeting actually needs. The next meeting goes in from 10am to 11am. Then there’s one from 11am to 11.30am. Back in the days when people went to the office for their meetings there would at least be an opportunity to walk from one meeting room to another – if you were lucky.

Now that a lot of meetings are on-screen, it’s possible to stay planted at your desk for hours on end, flicking from one meeting to the next until you can’t remember who you’ve talked to, what you’ve said or what you agreed to do and your blood sugar is dangerously low because you forgot to eat or spiking because you’ve been eating sugary snacks all day.

Enough!

The simplest way to break this habit is to make your meetings less than an hour. Experiment with different options – start at five or ten minutes past the hour so that everyone has the opportunity to take a break before they come to your meeting.

Alternatively, you could make your meetings 20 minutes or 40 minutes, creating a breathing space between meetings and – one hopes – making the meetings more efficient.

Bad habit #2 – not planning your workload

If you plan the work you’re going to do in advance and block out time in your calendar, it becomes blindingly obvious that you can’t spend all day in meetings. You’ll never get anything done! Even if you are a brilliant delegator (an endangered species, I believe) you still need time to delegate properly. Forwarding an email and adding ‘please take care of this’ does not, in my book, constitute proper delegation.

Ok, if you’ve got a very experienced team that might be fine. If not, then the best guarantee of getting the work done the way you want it done is to take some time with your team member to explain the outcome required.

If you have a lot of work that you intend to do yourself, rather than delegate, it also makes sense to block out time in your calendar to do it. I can see everyone nodding sagely. I know the majority of people don’t do this.

One simple way to break this bad habit is to protect a part of your day and keep it free of all meetings. Think about when you’re at your best and just block it out. For example, you might institute a rule of no meetings before 10am to give you time to work on the really important stuff while you’re fresh in the morning. Or you might take two afternoons per week and block them out for project work. You could have a whole meeting-free day every week.

The important thing is to protect some time so you can do the tasks you collect in the meetings you attend. (No, that’s not what your evenings and weekend are for!)

Bad habit #3 – saying ‘yes’ to everything

You can’t do everything. Shall I repeat that? You can’t do everything.

If you’re a senior leader and/or you have a lot of technical expertise the chances are that people from all over the organisation will want your input to something. At first, it’s gratifying to be consulted. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to influence decisions and steer a course. It’s flattering to think that they can’t do it without you.

Recognise that?

Perhaps you also recognise what comes next…

Your diary is full of meetings. You block out time to work on a project or strategy and someone invites you to a meeting in that window. ‘Please’, they say, ‘it’s urgent and we really need your input’. ‘Alright’ you say, resigning yourself to an evening at your desk to compensate.

Yes, we all want to be good colleagues and support the team. We want to do what’s right for the business. The sad truth is that if you keep dropping everything and jumping to the needs of anyone who asks, you are teaching them that it’s ok to inflict their crises on you. You are teaching them that you will drop everything and help them out when they have a problem.

Wouldn’t you rather teach them the value of planning and of dealing with problems before they become urgent?

The antidote to this bad habit is to say ‘no’. Or some polite version thereof. You might say, ‘I’m in back-to-back meetings today [!!]. I can fit you in tomorrow morning.’

Or how about, ‘My time is completely committed today. Why don’t you send me a summary of the situation and your questions about it and I’ll get back to you tomorrow (or later in the week)’.

It can be done politely. The point is to do it.

Ok. Rant over. It frustrates me enormously to see talented people working ridiculous hours because so much of their days are taken up with meetings. I’m the first to extol the value of getting people together and – well – working together. I just hate to see meetings for the sake of meetings detracting from the opportunity to do great work.

It’s in your hands…