Shorten, consolidate, or reduce meetings

Meetings are kryptonite for focus work. Not only do meetings consume the time during which they’re held, but they also make it more difficult to get real work done in the time around the meetings. Mix-in multiple meetings and a day becomes Swiss cheese with all of the productivity slipping through the holes.

That’s not to say that meetings are never productive, but we have to understand that meetings are just a tool and use them with discretion. If, as a developer, you’re finding yourself in more than a couple of meetings each week or spending multiple hours in meetings on a regular basis, that should raise some red flags. You don’t necessarily want to immediately cancel meetings, but you should always be ready to scrutinize the net value of a given meeting.

The vast majority of changes to meetings require deeper cultural acceptance. So these aren’t necessarily easy modifications. With some care, however, they can happen.

Don’t glorify meeting attendance

First and foremost, there’s some stigma that needs to go. People avoid declining meetings because they’re afraid of being perceived as being disinterested, lazy, or not team players. Similarly, some people are concerned when they’re excluded from meetings. The result is often over-inviting people and then they’re afraid to decline. So meetings shatter everyone’s schedule to bits.

Now you have an oversubscribed meeting wasting hours for multiple people all because people were afraid of giving the wrong impression. At a cultural level, your team has to remove any stigma for individuals declining meetings. Then, it has to ensure that people don’t take it personally if they’re not invited to a meeting. It’s often uncomfortable to exclude people from meetings, but we need to recognize that it’s often more important to avoid a meeting than it is to attend the meeting. So, when someone isn’t invited to a meeting, the assumption shouldn’t be that their contribution isn’t important, it should be assumed that their work is too important to interrupt with a meeting.

Strive for fewer meetings

You can also reduce meetings by canceling standing meetings, and replacing them with asynchronous check-ins. At Wildbit, we use Basecamp’s automatic check-ins to drastically cut back on regular meetings. Instead, people check-in with updates when they have a chance. If we still need a meeting, we’ll have one, but meetings have to earn their time. We don’t default to meetings.

If canceling meetings won’t work, you may be able to shorten meeting defaults to 15 or 30 minutes instead of an hour. Interestingly enough, you’ll likely find that people naturally adapt to the shorter time and focus on only the important things rather than waste time just to fill the allotted time slot.

You can also design your meeting process to create just enough friction around scheduling meetings so that people have to really believe a meeting is important before they commit to scheduling and leading one. One of the best ways to do this is to create a strong expectation that meeting organizers come incredibly prepared with notes and key points for everyone. At Amazon, meetings start with everyone in attendance reading a brief summary before they discuss anything. If organizers have to prepare and send a detailed agenda with goals to all attendees when the meeting is scheduled, they’ll naturally be much more selective about the items that justify a meeting.

Make meetings valuable for everyone

Sometimes, meetings will involve one or more remote people and a collection of people at the office. Instead of having the office folks meet in a conference room and video chat with the remote team, it’s much more inclusive to have everyone call in from their desk. This ensures everyone can see and hear everyone else and that the remote team members aren’t excluded. Meetings will be much more efficient, and nobody has to wander over to a meeting room and mill around.

Finally, since many meetings are about making decisions, these can often happen in project management applications. Instead of holding the meeting, the organizer can simply post the agenda, goals, and questions to your project management application and let people chime in as time permits. Then, if it can’t be resolved, set a time for a meeting.

We’re way too quick to default to hour-long meetings for everything, but when you break it down, this is one of the most anti-productive behaviors teams can have. Developers need quiet, uninterrupted stretches of time to do their best work, and meetings completely counteract that. It may not be possible to completely eliminate meetings, but you can definitely reduce their impact on productivity. It may require some cultural adjustment, but in the end, it’s worth it.

Your next steps

1. Remove any stigma around declining meetings.
2. If anybody is remote, run meetings with everyone video chatting individually at their desk.
3. Question whether a meeting is the right medium or whether email, chat, or other tools can mitigate the need for a meeting at all.
4. When a meeting is necessary, default to 15-minute meetings instead of an hour.
5. Where possible, replace standing meetings with automated check-ins.
6. Create meeting friction with expectations that anyone requesting a meeting provide a detailed agenda well in advance of the meeting.
7. Create threads in team tools so that those who couldn’t make the meeting can catch up and share thoughts asynchronously.