Meetings — The ultimate time killer (or One man’s journey to go to bed on time)

How many times have you found yourself working late at night to get your “real work” done after you’ve spent the whole day at the office? After getting things done do you feel good and rarely stop to think about what happened? Or about where all those working hours went?

It used to happen to me a lot when I was a young manager. I felt that being invited to meetings meant that I’m doing my job. Someone invited me — I need to be there, right?

One day, I found myself reviewing code at 00:30, not in my best shape, with red eyes. Code that was supposed to have been reviewed by the end of that working day, and I wondered — why didn’t I have time to do it during the day while I was sharp and focused?

Then it came to me…ahhh…. all those nasty meetings!! So I decided to try and understand what was happening by running a short analysis on my calendar. I found that 40% of the time I had spent in meetings that day was a waste of my time.

After a couple of days, I formalized the process:

1. Look at your calendar and color code (blue) all the meetings you initiated and you’re sure you needed.
2. For every other meeting, when the meeting is done, give it one of 2 colors:
3. Green for meetings that were effective and you’re happy you spent your time attending. Red for meetings where you wasted your time.

At the end of the week, review your calendar and you start to see a pattern for what meetings should you decline or skip. And the following week — start declining and skipping!

An example of a day in your calendar:

After 4 weeks, you should find that you’ve stopped doing your “real work” after hours, and that you spend most of your office hours actually working on significant tasks that are on your priority list.

There are many other methods you can use to make your meetings more efficient that are documented all over the web (having an agenda, making sure the attendee list is relevant…) but this simple change is easy to implement by yourself, and hands the control over your time back to you. It’ll make you more productive and ensure that you’re doing your real work when you’re at your best. Enjoy!