Day #5: How much time is wasted in a bad meeting?

After 3 years of running a remote team across different time zones, I’ve come up with my formula to calculate time wasted because of bad meetings:

Time Wasted = Meeting Duration x Number of Participants

For example: If you run a useless 1-hour meeting with 6 people, you didn’t just waste 1 hour, you wasted 6.

To prevent many wasted hours, I would like to encourage you to ask yourself these 4 questions before scheduling a meeting with someone:

1, Does it have to be a meeting?

This question is especially critical if you are working in a remote team across different time zones, where coordinating schedules is a lot of work.

There are many situations in which a live meeting wouldn’t be the best communication option. If you have ever sat through a meeting and couldn’t stop thinking: “This could have been an email or a 5-minute Loom video”, you know what I mean.

2, Does everyone on the invite list have to be there?

I’ve been in many meetings where my presence did not add any significant value to the problem-solving process. Just sitting and occasionally zoning out.

There isn’t a worse feeling than feeling useless. So stop trying to include everyone in a meeting for the sake of “inclusion”. Exclusion is showing respect to both the people attending the meeting and those who save time by not attending.

Effective meetings include the right people and exclude everyone else.

3, Is there anything participants need to prepare in advance?

If we’re going to review an 80-slide presentation, send it in advance.

If we’re going through the terms of our contract, send it in advance.

If we’re sharing our thoughts on a complex business problem, send me the brief in advance.

If you send these in advance, and I have more time to review and think about them, we might not need a meeting after all. Time saved again.

4, Can I do this in two-thirds of the time?

It really doesn’t have to be an hour.

40-minute meetings are absolutely fine. Same with 20-minute ones. Try to run a meeting in 2/3 of the original duration next time, you’ll be surprised by how much more you can get done in a shorter period of time.

Conclusion

I still believe a live meeting is an awesome tool to align teams, energize people, and clarify miscommunication. I have many live meetings with my team and always prefer to check in with my long-distance friends via video calls rather than text messages.

The energy of being live and synchronous with other human beings, to me, can never be replaced by asynchronous communication.

I have nothing against live meetings as a tool. I’m only against poor ways of using (and abusing) it.

Remember that this is just 1 tool in your communication and collaboration toolkit. With the advancement of technology, there are so many other powerful tools being created, waiting to be explored.

Don’t default to 1. Explore. Experiment. Get creative. Be more effective.