10 ways to spend less time in meetings

Have you ever been in a meeting that could have been an email? 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

I’ve attended terrible meetings. I’ve led many of them. They could have been shorter. Half the people didn’t need to be there. And they probably didn’t need to be meetings at all.

But I’ve also been to meetings where we made decisions in 30 minutes that we’d discussed for weeks over email. There was no substitute for the meeting. We needed to be in the same room to make progress on hard questions.

I’m a true believer in the power of a well-run meeting. I just think we should have as few of them as possible. How do we minimize the time we spend in meetings while maximizing their benefits?

We need a process:

1. Only meet when there’s no other option.
2. Avoid default meeting lengths of 30 or 60 minutes when 10 will do.
3. Shorten your calendar defaults to automate #2.
4. Never schedule a recurring meeting until you can prove it’s necessary.
5. Invite the smallest group necessary to make a decision.
6. Decline meetings where you’re not critical to making the decision.
7. Politely leave a meeting early when you don’t need to be there.
8. Schedule meetings back-to-back to reduce context switching.
9. Schedule “no meetings” days.
10. Champion steps 1 through 9 throughout your team and company.

It only takes a few minutes to be deliberate about this process, and you’ll save you and your team hours per week.

1) Does this need to be a meeting?

Your answer should always be “no” until proven otherwise.

Instead of scheduling a meeting, can you:

• Make a decision alone, and just do the thing?
• Send an email, message, or create a doc that others can review independently?
• Talk to someone over the phone for 5 minutes?

These alternatives are obvious. Still, we all have meetings that should have been emails. If you’re having too many meetings, consider these options before you schedule.

My friend Danny and I built a tool — Should It Be A Meeting? — that helps you evaluate these alternatives in a fun way.

Generally, you need to answer yes to these four questions to have a meeting:

• Do you need to make a decision?
• Does the decision require input from more than one other person?
• Does the group need to talk about it at the same time, in the same room (physically or virtually)?
• Is this problem truly urgent? Can we not wait a week to see if this problem solves itself?

I cannot overstate the importance of this exercise. Spending 1 minute on this could save hours of your team’s time. Slow down and think before you schedule.

2) Make the meeting as long as it needs to be. No longer.

Once a meeting must happen, you need to set its length. Like everything in this list, do it deliberately.

Have you ever been in a meeting that just seems to end right on time, no matter how long the meeting was? There’s a law for that:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

You’ll always fill the time you have, so you should minimize the time you have to fill.

This is the right time to create an agenda. Articulate what you want to cover in detail, dividing the agenda into topics, attaching time estimates to each:

Spreadsheets provide necessary structure to agendas that normal docs cannot

We don’t want to rush important decisions, but we also want to be decisive. If 1 hour is appropriate for a hard topic, that’s fine! Think about this length and estimate methodically. Don’t just schedule time and hope for the best.

You are not tied to the meeting lengths of 15, 30, 60 minutes that Google and Microsoft provide. Let the agenda dictate your meeting length, not your calendar defaults.

3) Make your default meeting as short as possible

We’ve started to establish a solid process, but it can take time to do this for every meeting. We want to automate everything possible to minimize the time we spend thinking about it.

Google Calendar and Outlook both allow you to change your default meeting length. You should set this to the smallest possible value: no more than 5 or 10 minutes. If you forget to create an agenda (see above), you minimize the time you spend in meetings by default.

4) Recurring meetings should be rare

Meetings should never happen more than once unless you can prove that recurrence benefits your team.

1:1s between managers and employees must recur. Time should always be made for employees to talk about career growth and provide feedback to their managers.

If your company is about to lose a major client or you’re rapidly losing revenue, and it’s a fixable problem, you should be meeting every day.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. Only you know what matters to you and how frequently you need to meet about it. But I hope you see the theme: set your meeting frequency deliberately based on the needs of the meeting.

You should re-evaluate this frequency as soon as possible (after the second meeting). To automate this habit, end the recurrence after the 2nd meeting:

This meeting will only happen twice. This setting forces you to say, “we think there’s value in a recurring meeting, so let’s have this meeting twice and determine whether this value holds up under scrutiny.” At that point, you can:

• Not re-schedule the meeting. Congratulations, you just got hours of your time back!
• If there is value, you’ll have to repeat all of the steps in this article, which forces you to be mindful in setting the length, frequency, and participants. You might decide to have the meeting with a smaller group, or for a shorter time.

5) Who needs to be there?

Have you ever been at a meeting where you didn’t say a word? I’m going to stop asking rhetorical questions with obvious answers…

When you organize a meeting, ask, “what is the minimum set of people necessary to make this decision?”, then invite only those people.

You should never invite a whole team of people when one person can advocate for that team’s needs. If you think someone might be critical, but you’re not sure, make them optional and communicate that option clearly. Share the agenda so it’s clear who needs to show up.

6) Do I need to be there?

It’s tough for meeting organizers to know whether everyone they invited is critical to the decision, so everyone should be empowered to say no to meetings.

If an employee is telling you she doesn’t need to be at a meeting and has other work to do, that’s amazing! She’s telling you she wants to get work done. Treasure this moment and let her do it.

If she truly does need to be at that meeting, you’ve failed to communicate that effectively. It’s not her fault that you haven’t articulated the goals of the meeting.

7) Do I need to be there for the whole meeting?

If you cover more than one topic in a meeting, the whole group probably isn’t relevant for every one. Structure your agenda items such that the first item is the one that requires input from the most people, the second requires input from fewer, and so on.

This allows people to leave halfway through the meeting and minimizes the time the collective group spends in meetings. Communicate that leaving a meeting is OK.

Elon Musk agrees. But when you leave, do it kindly. If you’re running a meeting, you probably put some effort into it, so if your boss just walks out of the room without a word, it’s probably going to sting.

8) Context switching

One of these schedules is better than the other:

Intuitively, we know that we don’t get good work done in small breaks between meetings. So the schedule on day 2 — stacking meetings together as a group — seems more ideal. There’s research to support this. After an interruption (like a meeting), it takes 15 minutes to get back into focused work. We’re spending time before a meeting preparing for it. We call this collective time “context switching”.

The best meeting schedule is the one that minimizes context switching for the individuals who do focused work.

To minimize context switching, give your team general rules about when to schedule meetings. Bosses have to say, “we’re going to have all meetings in the morning and devote afternoons to focused work.” That is the only way it will get done.

9) No meetings day

The best way to minimize context switching is to have no meetings at all. Clearly this can’t happen every day, but it can probably happen one day a week.

Many companies schedule these days mid-week. Pinterest experimented with 3 no meeting days per week. This allows the group to plan work early in the week, execute on that work mid-week, and reflect at the end.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach with no meetings days, and for some organizations, it’s tough to manage. But it proves to your team that you trust them.

10) Put it into practice

The only way to successfully change your meeting culture is to have company leadership articulate it. Without that, it will fail.

You should make the following points explicit to your team:

• Make it clear that you genuinely value your employees’ time.
• Make it clear that everyone’s effort is required to make this work.
• Clearly state that anyone — no matter who they are — is empowered to say no to meetings, or question the need for a meeting. It should be OK, and celebrated, for a new college grad to decline a meeting from the CEO if it’s not a valuable use of time. If the CEO can’t justify the need, why is the meeting happening? The CEO and every leader below them has to champion this mindset.
• Provide a clear mechanism for employees to give anonymous feedback to meeting organizers and company leadership. Meeting organizers must acknowledge that feedback.

Without this:

• Employees don’t feel empowered to say no, so they keep showing up to meetings they don’t need to attend.
• They don’t provide feedback (in the worst case, they fear retribution for speaking up)
• They provide feedback, but if it’s not acknowledged, they’ll never provide feedback again.

Clearly communicate this vision and be deliberate in your approach. It takes time and effort, but it will have enormous benefits.