Wage war against late-night meetings

A friend told me recently how late-night meetings pissed her off. She would miss family time and hit the bed late. And the background stress wouldn’t let her sleep well. She felt helpless. I pondered on how vital sleep is and how we can fight off pesky late-night meetings.

You can get away with a lack of quality sleep once in a while. But when it becomes frequent, it is disastrous. Your risks of serious health problems arise. Hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, heart attack, and stroke, to name a few. Your health insidiously declines. Your day to day joy and productivity takes a toll.

You feel lethargic all day. You lack enthusiasm and wonder why you aren’t as sharp and creative as before. You avoid mentally demanding, important tasks. And you wade through the day tired and stressed. Over time, it becomes a habit while you keep forgetting an important truth.

Sleep services your body and mind.Just like you service your car regularly. If you don’t, you end up with way more expensive damages. Irreversible sometimes. You might need replacements which may or may not be available. And you certainly don’t want that to happen to your body. Therefore, sleep is crucial. Then why do we neglect it?

Because making money is also important. Therefore, work is important. And late-night meetings form part of your work. So what do you do? How do you attack this puzzle?

You deploy “The EADO strategy”.

Eliminate→Automate→Delegate→Optimize 😎.

✂️Eliminate

First, go for the kill. See if you can get rid of the meeting. You would be surprised by how many meetings you can eliminate if only you asked yourself a few questions.

Is this meeting worth it?

Understand the true cost of a meeting. When you book a 1-hour meeting with 5 participants, it is no longer a 1-hour meeting. It is a 5 hours meeting. You are eating 5 man-hours. And at $100 per hour, it is a $500 meeting. Add the morale and productivity lost due to context switching and the true costs emerge. Beware.

Will it be a disaster if the meeting didn’t happen tonight?

Stop abusing the word “urgent”. Think hard before saying, “It is urgent”.You feeling an urge to call a meeting right away may not always mean the matter is truly urgent. An emergency is the only true urgency. Think objectively.

How can I find some quiet time to write stuff thoughtfully?

Find time to write thoughtfully and tersely. Don’t use the crutch of “syncing quickly” for avoiding independent thinking. Default to asynchronous, written communication in routine. Your productivity will hit through the roof.

Writing will make you distil your thoughts. You will present arguments and data more cohesively. Often you will find you no longer need the meeting. Because you resolved the issue in the process of writing itself.Or because you don’t yet fully understand what you are talking about and need to think it through first.

Writing will lead you to spend less and less time in meetings. That will in turn give you more time to write. It will become a feedback loop which will feed on itself.

🤖Automate

If you can’t eliminate the meeting, try automating it. Daily status meetings are a good example. They are important because you must be on top of everything. But you don’t have to pull everybody into a meeting. Instead, see if you can get something like a dashboard implemented. If that is infeasible, see if you can automate posting a daily query to everyone. I like how Basecamp allows you to do that.

👥Delegate

If you can’t eliminate or automate a meeting, delegate it. Can you find a person who would happily replace you in the meeting? Maybe somebody is in a different time zone. Look around.

🧐Optimize

Lastly, optimize. Aim to reduce the duration of the meeting.

Don’t book a meeting without a clear-cut agenda and a desired outcome.

See if you can make it mandatory to provide an agenda and an outcome. I read somewhere about an executive who was frustrated because of the sheer number of meetings booked with him for his advice. He finally mandated answering the following questions when someone requested a meeting with him.

• What is the problem?
• What are the possible solutions?
• What is your recommendation and why?

This alone significantly reduced the number of meetings. And now they only took a few minutes. Whoa! Because most of the thinking had been done upfront, a meeting was only required for making a decision. It was a game-changer

Prepare for the meeting.

Take the time to read the necessary information upfront so that nobody has to bring you up to the speed in the meeting. Or you don’t have to read it while others wait. If you are not ready for the meeting, apologize and request to reschedule. It won’t be a disaster. You couldn’t find time to prepare because the matter was neither urgent nor important enough in the first place. If people still can’t make time, make reading part of the meeting format itself. Amazon claims this is the smartest thing they did.

Think hard about who to include in the meeting.

If you want to keep somebody informed, don’t pull them into the meeting. Instead, share a written summary afterwards. I have attended countless meetings in which I wasn’t required and spent the whole time avoiding dozing off 🥱. The meeting could have been an email instead. I could have read it in my own time and paid better attention.

Stick to the agenda.

There is no harm in sharing a quick personal story. Or cracking a joke. Until and unless you get carried away and don’t come back to the point quickly. The mood quickly spreads and soon meeting becomes a watercooler chat. If that is what you want, by all means, do that. But be clear about the objective of the meeting.

Listen more and talk less.

Listen to what everyone has to say. Talk last. You will have all the data you need will tailor your argument better. You will cut to the chase. And if there is an argument, don’t aim for winning it. Aim for the truth instead. The meeting will finish sooner. And you will drastically increase your effectiveness.

That’s it.

Remember. Eliminate→Automate→Delegate→Optimize 😎. EADO.

You don’t need longer work hours. You need better work hours.