Over the past few months, knowledge workers around the world entered an interesting experiment, working from home full-time.
The original outlook of the experiment was rosy. You spent less time commuting therefore you had more time to do things. However, the rosy period didn’t last long. Soon, workers began to feel a lack of connection with their colleagues. The solution was to have more virtual meetings to allow knowledge workers to collaborate, connect, and maintain relationships. Eventually, virtual meetings began to take over our personal lives as well. Up popped Zoom get-togethers, Zoom game nights, Zoom dinners, Zoom classes, Zoom yoga, Zoom fill-in-the-blank.
Months into this never-ending work from home situation, it seems like we are all Zoomed out.
Knowledge workers have long complained about energy draining, time-wasting meetings. The whole point of a meeting is to increase collaboration and alignment, but often you leave meetings no better off then when you started. Virtual meetings have the same issues as in-person meetings, but the issues are more apparent because we are having more meetings then before. Here are three reasons why.
In the office setting, it was easy to look over at our colleague and see if they were busy. If they weren’t busy, you could walk-up to them and have a quick discussion. When working virtually, this workflow doesn’t exist, so instead of being able to walk up or grab a coffee or chat by the water cooler, you book a meeting.
You no longer have commute times, therefore there seems to be more time available to work. Unfortunately, many of us spend this extra time in more meetings.
Working from home causes you to feel more pressure to showcase the value you bring to your workplace. Unfortunately, your manager or peers cannot just look at you to verify that you are working, so you inadvertently use meetings attendance as a signal that you are in fact working.
So… the question of the day is, how do you get your calendar back under control?
In this blog, I am going to stay away from typical advice like calendar blocking strategies or delegating meeting to others, instead I will take you through my thought process on how to decide what meetings to attend.
Let’s start at the beginning. When you receive a new meeting request, the first question you should ask yourself is:
What value would I bring to this meeting?
If you cannot immediately answer this question, you should not immediately accept the meeting invite. A deeper investigation is needed by asking more questions like:
Am I presenting at the meeting?
If yes, then you should attend the meeting. Pretty obvious.
Is it an information share or a discussion type meeting?
If it is an information share meeting, question yourself on whether you need to attend this meeting live. Most information sharing meetings are recorded so you can view the content afterwards. A bonus tip is to watch all recorded meetings played back in high speed. You can get away with having the video played back at 1.5x without losing any context. If the video player doesn’t have that option, download the video and use your local media player to speed up the content.
Am I expected to actively contribute to the meeting?
If the meeting is a discussion type meeting, ask yourself, do you have something relevant to contribute to the conversation? If you are the topic expert or have critical information about the topic or your manager expects you to contribute, these are all signs you should attend the meeting. But if you aren’t expected to contribute or don’t think you have anything of value to add, decline the meeting.
Will the meeting be successful without you?
Be honest with yourself here. It’s hard for your ego to take a backseat but sometimes it must to protect your own sanity. Another way to look at this question would be to ask yourself, what would happen if you were sick or on vacation? Would the meeting still be a success without you? If the answer is Yes, then decline the meeting.
To summarize, before accepting a meeting request, you must determine the value you add to the meeting. What I realize is that many people attend meetings on the premise that the content of the meeting will be valuable to them. The difference is subtle but important.
Will I add value to the meeting?
compared to
Will joining the meeting bring value to me?
There is a clear distinction between these two questions. The former are meetings you should attend, the latter are meetings you should watch in high-speed playback at a time that suits you.
Finally, the last stress test I use before accepting a meeting is to compare the importance and urgency of the meeting to the importance and urgency of my other tasks. Here’s the question to ask:
What else could I be doing that I am not doing because I am attending a meeting?
You have important tasks, milestones, and project deliverables that you need to complete. You are a busy person. Therefore, before accepting any meeting, you should look holistically at all your pending tasks and find out where the meeting fits in terms of priority. I personally categorize and manage my tasks based on the Eisenhower matrix. Once my tasks are laid out in this format, it becomes easy for me to evaluate the urgency and importance of an incoming meeting request.
Managing your calendar is hard and trust me, there is no silver bullet when it comes to protecting your time, but one thing that will certainly help is to attend less meetings.