July 31, 2023

Death by 1000 meetings

My last role was plagued by meetings. Some days, I’d have 8 straight hours of meetings. When was I supposed to accomplish any of the things decided on in those meetings? I started to notice that other folks on the team would compensate for this by working during meetings. That never felt ideal.

With few exceptions, if you have enough mental bandwidth to do meaningful work on something unrelated to the meeting during a meeting, you either aren’t needed enough to be there or the meeting isn’t focused enough.

The more teams your work impacts (as is often the case with design system teams), the more likely you are to get spam invites to meetings.

Here are a few rules of thumb I’ve found to keep meetings under control:

• When you schedule a meeting, attach a clear agenda. What questions will you ask? What are you hoping to accomplish or decide? If you can’t answer these beforehand, meeting guru Kevin Hoffman says, “cancel a meeting if you cannot identify a decision that needs to be made out of the meeting.”
• Related, don’t be afraid to turn down meetings you’ve been invited to where there’s no clearly defined goal.
• Invite only people who can contribute to the meeting goals. When inviting people from other teams or outside my organization, I typically end with, “feel free to invite anyone you see fit from your side.”
• If you struggle to keep on track when you’re deep in discussion, assign someone from your team to facilitate or keep time.
• Schedule 30-minute meetings for 25 minutes. Schedule 1-hour meetings for 50 minutes. This gives remote teams time for bio breaks, and helps account for travel time for in-person teams.
• Make it async when you can. Async is especially helpful for remote teams in diverse locations/timezones. Daily check-ins and quick questions are good candidates for async. Project kick-offs, prototype walkthroughs — really anything that benefits from complex real-time back-and-forth — are good candidates for synchronous meetings.
• Remember the first point? End your meeting by recapping the decisions that were made and restating the expected next steps so everyone is on the same page. Bonus points for sharing a summary of the meeting with participants afterward so it can be forward to relevant team members.

Following these guidelines might feel odd at first, but after a few weeks, these should start to become second nature. And with any luck, you and your team will have a more manageable schedule.

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Cheers,

Up Next: Consensus-building exercises for large teams

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