Nate Clark's Writing

This article from Bloomberg crossed my path a while ago and while the headline “meetings cost big companies $100m/year” is clearly a hand-wavy bullshit number, it’s hard to argue that the corporate world couldn’t improve the ways we utilize meetings. Particularly concerning were the survey results that people feel they didn’t need to be in 1/3 of the meetings they attend and that women were much less likely to say no to a meeting than men were, which disproportionately hurts their career progression. So let me lay down a few helpful meeting tips I wish I had picked up earlier in my career.

If You Are Hosting a Meeting

• Have a goal. Meetings should have some target outcome: a decision to be made, a list of solutions resulting from a brainstorming session, increased engagement, etc.
  
  
• Once you have a goal consider the best form of communication to accomplish it. Some things are better done via email or group wiki page or something else. There’s a reason Googling “this could have been an email” returns 4.7 billion results, including some great memes. Status reports people just read aloud are usually better accomplished via internal pages, to give one example.
  
  
• Have an agenda. Many people (myself included) are not particularly quick on their feet. Having time to think through issues ahead of time gives everyone more time to process which leads to higher quality conversations. Amazon famously requires anyone holding a meeting to do a background writeup 24 hours prior to the meeting as a way of enforcing this. I don’t think people necessarily need to go that far, but you should absolutely spell out what will be discussed by at least the night before the meeting. If you don’t have time to do that you should probably cancel the meeting.
  
  
• Consider the time of day. People are more and less productive at different times of day; this is known as your ultradian rhythm. We could do a whole blog post on this, but the important take away as it pertains to meetings is you should NOT hold meetings during your peak performance hours. If you don’t know when your peak performance is, probabilistically most people are at peak productivity between 9 and 11am. Avoid meetings then!
  
  Also consider the costs of context switching. This is particularly insidious for developers, where frequently switching tasks leads to much lower productivity and burnout. Don’t schedule meetings that break up your day into too small chunks. Be sure you have blocks of time for deep focus in order to allow yourself to get stuff done.
  
  
• Keep it on track. Occasionally meetings can go off on a tangent, taking us away from addressing the goal. You are responsible for guiding conversation it back toward the target.
  
  
• Ensure everyone participates. Explicitly call on people if they’re being quiet. This helps facilitate inclusion and psychological safety, which is a key component of high performing teams. If people have nothing valuable to add to the conversation, then they probably shouldn’t have been invited.
  
  
• Don’t be afraid to cancel it. This is especially true of recurring meetings.
  
  
• Post meeting minutes. Writing down the gist of the discussion is great for increasing telepathy across your firm – people who weren’t invited or can’t make a meeting can still benefit from learning of the conversation after the fact. It’s also great for information retention; People often need to look back and remember the rationale for decisions, and reading is a whole lot easier than remembering.
  
  
• Produce action. Assign follow-up tasks, and make sure they happen.
  

If You Are Invited to a Meeting

• SAY NO! Feel free to say no! It’s ok to say no! I would highly encourage you to say no if you do not think it a valuable use of your time. You do not have to go to meetings you are invited to. (I’m running out of ways to say the same thing to drive the point home.) Maybe you can get 95% of the value of attending the meeting just by reading the meeting minutes afterwards. If you think you should attend but the meeting is held during your peak productivity time, it is also ok to ask the organizer to move it. If the meeting’s goal is unclear or there’s no agenda, feel free to ask them to clarify those things before agreeing to attend – I do this all the time and no one has said they hate me yet (to my face).
  

• Show up on time. Maybe this is just my midwestern upbringing, but I find it disrespectful of others’ time to keep them waiting. It’s also wasteful of company resources. I was once on a larger call, and while waiting for the meeting to start I calculated the total salary of the attendees at several hundred dollars per minute! So much money we were burning just waiting for people to dial in… If your previous meeting is running over, leave. Don’t punish people in the next meeting because someone running the previous meeting didn’t effectively manage time.
  
  
• Schedule breaks between meetings. Microsoft Human Factors Lab did brain scans and found that people quickly become burned out when attending back to back meetings. Give yourself at least a 5 minute break between meetings to reduce your stress levels and clear your mind.
  

These guidelines aren’t meant to apply to one-off phone calls or water-cooler problem solving sessions – those types of things are naturally more ad hoc and very important for maintaining telepathy. But if you find yourself attending regular, organized meetings that don’t adhere to these standards, I’d highly recommend politely advocating they strive to improve.

Do your part to make this joke not relatable 🙂