Meetings, Again
Meetings are a pet peeve of mine (you know that by now). My buddy Mitch Wyle (we know each other from eBay) summarised a Twitter thread on meetings in his blog and thought I might like it - well, yes and no. The suggestions amount to putting hard boundaries on the number of, and time spent in, meetings, and to enforce some rigour around scheduling them in the first place.
I'm skeptical about any approach that tries to address the meeting matter from an angle of time spent and then does things such as applying quotas and rules that all amount to putting an upper boundary on time spent in meetings. This often cumulates in simplistic takes such as that "meetings are bugs" (Shopify, 2023).
People shouldn't care so much about time spent in meetings, but about value derived in them. Consequently, optimisation attempts should target not time, but value.
I also strongly suggest that everyone, before taking any stance on meetings, should read Patrick Lencioni's "Death by Meeting".
Everybody hates a bad meeting. Knowing how to love good ones is surprisingly hard.
Tags: work