Does It Need to Be a Meeting? Three Tips for Breaking a “Meeting-Rich” Culture

According to Reclaim.ai, professionals have over 25 meetings every week — a near 70% increase since 2020.

Read that again. That’s the average.

Now let’s talk about breaking that culture.

Tip #1: Do all the things everyone else has talked about.

Look, a ton of people are writing about this, and all are good tips. Ask if it needs to be a meeting. Invite only those people necessary. Cancel recurring meetings whenever possible. A quick Google search will give you lots of thoughts here, though my favorite is shoulditbeameeting.com.

This assumes you own most of your meetings — what if you don’t?

Tip #2: Block time on your calendar — and tell people you do it.

I block the first and last 30 minutes of my day to process email. I also block between 90–120 minutes in the middle of the day to ensure I eat and process a to-do list from the first half of the day.

And I tell people I do this. Sometimes meetings get put in those times. Most of the time, they don’t. The alternative to blocking your calendar is not getting things done or burning out — and good leaders don’t want you doing either of those.

This doesn’t solve the problem of the culture — it just helps you (and sometimes, that may be the only thing you can do).

Tip #3: Change the culture to collaboration over meetings.

Remember all those decades ago before the pandemic? Oh — that was a few years ago…oops.

Remember instead of meetings, we’d go talk to people when or if we needed to? Why should proximity change that?

Work with people to kill recurring meetings and normalize pinging or calling people in a hybrid world vs. consistently scheduling meetings. We need to talk to someone not close to us, so we schedule a meeting — which takes as long as it’s scheduled for, not how long is needed — and everyone else does the same thing.

Break the cycle — and bring others along, including leaders. Say “what if I scheduled time for you to review x that we usually have a meeting over, and you can ping me if you have questions?” People may start to see they don’t need to meet over it after all (and you’ve taken tip #2 to others).

Meetings kill productivity and can ruin culture. If you’re not making a decision, planning or brainstorming…it may not need to be a meeting.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog