Meetings: the Bane of Productive Performance

Note: This is an excerpt from Growth & Productivity: 14 Principles to Achieve More, a free e-book from Grove Ave, a new startup that helps individuals focus on their growth. Click here to get your free download of the 70+ page e-book.

How many times have you been sitting in a meeting and said to yourself, “this is such a waste of time?” I think one of the worst uses of time are regularly scheduled meetings, which seems to be an unchangeable fact of office life. Regularly scheduled meetings can be unproductive because it assumes that the people in the office have a regular rhythm. But just from observation, we know that offices don’t always operate at the same pace — externally imposed deadlines, seasons, holidays, personal events such as the birth of children and deaths of parents, all of these things are happening all the time to people. Sometimes you need to meet more often — other times you don’t — and if your office isn’t one that calibrates to these demand signals, then avoiding these meetings altogether could boost your productivity.

If at all possible, start trying to extricate yourself from these time commitments that you know you aren’t going to get a good return-on-time-invested. Ignore that fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) feeling — you aren’t missing anything. Start by learning which groups of people are most inefficient when it comes to meeting discussions and avoiding them. Figure out which regular meetings are for informational exchange (which can easily be done on sites like Basecamp, Slack, or email) and which are ones where actual decisions will be made. Finally, before attending the meeting, ask yourself if you’ll be contributing anything substantive to the discussion. If the answer is no, consider not going.

I know that skipping meetings all the time, or even most of the time, isn’t possible for everyone, but even executives and those with a lot of demands on their time can get themselves out of meetings. For example, Mark Cuban is famous for not going to meetings. Yes, he’s a billionaire so he can afford to do this because he’s not as reliant on others, but you’d be surprised at how far you can push the envelope on this. Ultimately, how can you know if you don’t try? You might be pleasantly surprised at how many unproductive meetings you can avoid.

Summary

• Don’t go to unnecessary meetings
• Learn who will waste your time and avoid them

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