6 tips for efficient meetings
Anyone who watched the American version of The Office knows the recurring trope of bad meetings. Everyone sits in the meeting room, one or two people speak, the information is usually irrelevant and people are looking for any excuse to get back to work. While it’s a TV show, it is a (slightly comical) reflection of reality — I have been in plenty of meetings like that in my career. As a software developer, meetings are a part of my day, but they are not the core part of my job.
The core of a software developer’s job is still coding, which requires concentration, focus, and thought. The price of having a meeting is not just the time it takes, but also context switching — you need to stop what you are doing, prepare for the meeting, attend the meeting, and then come back and focus your mind on what you were doing earlier (and sometimes you forget completely where you were).
I often find it ironic when companies have strict budgets for essential things that have a clearly labelled price, but completely neglect things that have an indirect price. For example, having a 1-hour company-wide meeting for a company of ~1000 people costs the company tens of thousands of dollars in wages alone, without even taking into account the opportunity cost of work not getting done.
The same logic applies at a smaller scale as well. The more meetings you have, the less time there will be to deliver the work. Therefore, it is really important to run meetings efficiently to minimise their cost.
1. Don’t have a meeting.
The first question you should ask yourself is — what am I trying to get out of the meeting and can I do it offline? Meetings take everyone off what they are doing, so they need to be worthwhile. Sometimes it may be better to communicate asynchronously via Slack or email. People can reply when they are not busy, thus using their time efficiently. It also has an additional benefit of visibility and future proofing — it gives everyone the chance to read the discussion and have access to it in the future, while meetings are usually forgotten unless someone goes through the trouble of documenting them.
2. Document it.
Unlike emails or messages, meetings are not readily available for future reference, so people might forget what was discussed, and those who did not attend the meeting might need to be given the same information again. Having to repeat the same conversations again is wasteful. This is why I think that having notes of the main talking points and outcomes is very helpful. This honour typically falls on the organiser, although you could have a volunteer taking notes as well, how you organise note taking is up to you.
Another option is recording the meeting, though I feel that this option is only good if the meeting involves a demonstration that cannot be captured in text. The main problem with recording a meeting is that recordings are not searchable. Someone who wants to find out one particular thing that was discussed in the meeting would potentially have to go through the whole meeting in order to find what they are looking for. Well-written notes would allow them to find the same information in a matter of seconds.
3. Have an agenda
The meeting agenda should be on the invite and should include the main topics of discussion. It gives everyone the opportunity to decide whether it is important for them to be in the meeting. You may think that you need everyone there, but other people might have things that are a higher priority for them at the time. Joining a meeting only to find out halfway that you were not really needed is frustrating and a waste of time.
The other benefit of the agenda is that it keeps the meeting to the point and reduces the risk of the meeting taking a detour. Make sure you stick to the agenda and defer new topics until the end of the meeting. If there is no time to cover them, then you can discuss the topics offline or schedule a follow-up meeting.
4. Invite only those you need
The more people you invite to the meeting, the more time is wasted in that meeting. For example, if you have multiple engineers in the team, it is unlikely that you need all of their input to make a decision. Unless you are discussing very important information that everyone needs to hear, it may be better to select a small group of key people to attend the meeting and the rest of the team can then read the meeting notes afterwards to see what was discussed. This way, the team can remain productive while the meeting is taking place.
On a related note, there are always people who seem to be in every meeting — usually managers and lead engineers. Think carefully if you really need them for the meeting — their schedule is usually very busy, so it might be harder to schedule around them and they would appreciate not being called into a meeting if they don’t have to be there.
5. Check people’s availability
It is very frustrating getting invited to a meeting when I already have that slot booked in my calendar. It forces me to either pick a meeting that I want to attend, or it puts the burden of rescheduling on me. There is a search functionality in Google Calendar or any other calendar tool that your company might be using that allows you to easily see the calendars of one or more people combined in one place so that you can find a time slot that everyone is available for.
You have a few options if you cannot find a time when everyone is available. If it’s a general-purpose team or company meeting, then pick a time that most people can make and record the meeting for the others to view later. If it’s a smaller group meeting, identify the key people needed for the meeting and make sure they are available, while the rest are optional (see tip 6).
6. Start and finish on time.
If your meeting starts 5 minutes late and you spend another 5 minutes chatting when you have 6 people in the meeting, you have cumulatively wasted 1 hour. The main reason why meetings tend to start late is that the previous meeting overran, thus resulting in a vicious cycle. Make sure you start wrapping the meeting up when there are 5 minutes left. A good way to do that is by scheduling 25 / 50-minute meetings instead of 30 / 60. This will build in some contingency time in case the meeting runs over slightly. If you see that the meeting can’t be concluded in the final 5 minutes, focus on summarising what is left to discuss and schedule a follow-up meeting, perhaps with a smaller audience, or just finish the discussion on Slack.
Like it or not, meetings are part of your daily job. When run well, they can be a very efficient way of communication, and when run badly, they can waste hours every day. Being efficient with your meetings will make more time for everything else, so it’s really worthwhile to make the effort to become better at it.
