Too Many Meetings Is Not Your Problem §
Highlights §
- Meetings are a symptom, not the disease. (View Highlight)
- Meetings are a symptom of broken process. We use meetings as a crutch, a fallback. When we don’t know how to get work done, or we’re not willing to invest in a process that will actually advance the goal, we schedule meetings. (View Highlight)
- Our seat at the table starts to matter more than getting something done when we’re sitting there. (View Highlight)
- Meetings are a symptom of not knowing what our jobs are. (View Highlight)
- I said no to meetings that I thought I didn’t need to be at, or which I thought would be a waste of time. I killed all the meetings I thought I was attending for status reasons (View Highlight)
- Removing meetings wasn’t disconnecting, it was the beginning of treating the underlying disease. I had time to think, design, and contribute more. I had time to unblock people who needed me. I was still in meetings over half of the time, but I was more focused and prepared in the meetings that remained. And I was able to spend more time connecting. (View Highlight)
- eliminating half of my meetings was a leadership effectiveness strategy. (View Highlight)
- Great process is lightweight, efficient, and adaptable. Too much is bad but not enough is worse. You need things like clear planning processes and well organized product development and design process that include all functions. And you need program managers (PgM, DpM, TpM, OMGpM) whose major job is to take care of this stuff. A great program manager can measure their worth in meetings removed. (View Highlight)
- Meetings are full of wasted time. The (View Highlight)
- Meetings are for real-time conversations that yield more efficient progress than we could do any other way. (View Highlight)
- Do the hardest part right away. Slam it right down on the table, 5 minutes in. I’ve been in so many hour-long meetings that filled up the first 55 minutes with BS, only to finally get to the thing we really needed to decide in the last 5. Why didn’t we start by discussing that? No one knows. Then we ran out of time. And scheduled another meeting. (View Highlight)
- You must document what happened in a meeting, then tell everyone. If a meeting yielded a decision, but no one told the people who needed to know, was there even a meeting? (View Highlight)
- No matter what, I want to remind you that, with few exceptions, your job is not to be in meetings. Your job is to make progress (View Highlight)