Timothy Luke Hopkins

How To Avoid Meeting Timesuck

Working in an office for several years, I’ve grown to despise meetings. Specifically, ineffective ramble-a-thons that are, ultimately, timesucks. They have so much potential to be collaborative and productive, but too often they fall short and contribute to wasted hours and deflated motivation.

I bring this up because of a great article on Inc.com, “A Bad Meeting is Like a Bad Marriage - You Feel Trapped,” that mentioned some great points about how to make meetings less crappy. They are:

1. State the objectives for the meeting, which generally are one of the following:
   • Gain agreement, permission or approval
   • Obtain feedback, opinions or access to necessary data
   • Answer questions
2. Share any progress you’ve made so far to accomplish the objectives (preferably before the meeting via email, so only new items will need to be covered in-person)
3. Ask attendees for the thing(s) you need from them to push the work forward
4. Capture next steps and action items from the meeting

These things seems simple enough, but workplaces have different philosophies for meetings. If you’d like to go the route of bashing meetings altogether, I encourage you to read Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Aside from being a fantastic short read, it goes to town a lot worse than I do on meetings.

My point is that you can and should stop having unnecessary meetings (Easier said than done, I know!). And if you do get the chance to run your own meeting, conduct it using the aforementioned points. Keep control of the show, even if someone tries to divert away from the meeting mission. It’ll make your workday much more pleasant, and just think of all the wonderful things you can produce when you don’t have to worry about the normal timesuck factor!