How to avoid meetings about meetings

Meetings are begun to share information or bring people to a common goal. This goes awry quickly, and if you see a pattern that hardly ever meetings end with anything other than time wasted, you are not alone. Meetings quickly become about additional sessions and less about their intended purpose and more about how to avoid meetings.

Often managers and leaders will host meetings to bring everyone on the same page.

Getting together for updates on each contributor’s efforts, policy changes, or having meetings purely for meeting’s sake are commonplace. Having a meeting every Monday afternoon because that is just what the team does isn’t generating any more energy into reaching goals, with team members eventually understanding that these sort of meetings are more for making an appearance.

Meetings have caused some of us to waste 23 hours a year – imagine the time you had to finish work if you could avoid meetings altogether.

9 ways to avoid meetings about meetings

1. Establish a strict agenda

Regularly scheduled meetings or meetings that are called to meet a specific purpose should all follow a given formula. First and foremost, establishing an agenda and knowing when to move on to the next topic. When addressing the group, a leader calls for only new information. When this has been exhausted progress to the next issue.

One thought to keep in mind is that not everyone may be ready to move on, or may want to continue revisiting the same topics. Directing that these concerns will be addressed privately and making time for that to happen will significantly reduce any building negativity from wanting to move on to a different subject.

2. Determine what questions need answering before the meeting

Questions alone isolate what is being delivered to what is relevant now or is foreseen to become important. If non-relevant or information that is being recycled into these questions needs to be stopped as soon as it is identified, this doesn’t mean to confront or address this with excessive bluntness but to ask in response to clarify how this information had become more relevant since the last meeting when it was brought to the groups attention then.

Identifying when information is appropriate or a topic has been exhausted can be difficult. Mainly when meetings are open, many speakers may be revolving through what they each believe is a relevant contribution.

A rotation of questions is the answer to guiding meetings and can be done as a leader or participant as long as at some point, participants are permitted to speak.

• “How will this help us reach this week’s goal?”

• “What are you expecting this information to build in our contribution?”

• “What can be done to change this?”

3. Determine how the meeting will change the current directive

Change should be the directive of every meeting. Moving forward and progressing through regular daily work or a project is essential. Is daily work the only topic of meetings? That’s fine; make it a goal to make one task more efficient for one week and then two.

4. Encourage participants to bring only new information to the table

Pushing each meeting participant to bring something new to the team will not only accomplish the tasks and goals set. This environment will bring the team together more cohesively so that everyone is now seen as a contributor.

It’s up to the leader to acknowledge these contributions and the efforts behind them. Recognising that holding each person or in larger meetings, each team is accountable for a particular group of tasks will offer encouragement to come to meetings prepared.

Including one very important event directly after and acknowledging this in the start will hold everyone to a time frame. A simple statement such as, ‘we all know that when we’re wrapped up here, we have a deadline on…’ places a sense of urgency on the team.

5. Set a time limit and stick with it

Stressing urgency could be a tool as a driving force in quick communication and a method of removing excess discussion. Lightning ‘yes or no’ rounds on goals or initiatives and one-sentence answers to leader-directed questions create this fast-paced feeling.

A leader's directing and moderating effort allows each person to give an opinion or feedback without wasting time or creating distractions. Distractions are often made on views of others’ feedback, that one subject is taken to another based on past actions and personal feelings.

6. Do YOU have to be at the meeting?

Many times too many people are at the meeting.

If others from your team are going, you might be able to skip. If the agenda doesn’t address something of concern, you might be able to skip it. If there is going to be a series of meetings, you probably don’t have to be at all of them.

If you don’t have to be there, skip it.

7. Are people prepared for the meeting?

Again, if you can’t skip, you can at least help to prod things along. Most people aren’t well prepared for meetings. You might be able to sniff this out and help handhold some information sharing beforehand. Your efforts pay huge dividends.

8. Is there a clear purpose for the meeting in the first place?

If you can’t skip the meeting, you might want to ensure it will be as productive as possible. In this case, you can do a little homework by contacting the organiser and clarifying goals. Often, this prompts them to think more about the meeting, which hopefully helps to improve their planning.

9. Block off your calendar

If any of the points above don’t work, you can block off times in your calendar to meet with yourself. This is where you can plan to work independently.

Rather than squeezing in time where you can, which may be off hours, you should block out some prime time for yourself. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good idea. One of those reasons is that people can’t easily book your time if you’re unavailable.

Do not feel bad

Here’s the thing. You are trying to be efficient with your time. That’s nothing to apologise for. In fact, your actions might be the sort of thing that inspires others to rethink their own meeting strategies a bit.

And, who knows, maybe if enough people start protecting their valuable time from wasteful meetings, the culture will shift slightly.

You don’t want to sacrifice your health and well-being by squeezing work around wasteful events.

If you are staying late to get work done. Or coming in early. Or working on weekends. Because your day is filled with useless meetings, you are making a grave mistake. You are sacrificing your personal time and adding lots of stress to yourself.

That does not help anyone. It’s better to be a little bolder about protecting your time from time-wasting meetings.

Final thoughts

Like most professionals, you are likely trying to do too much with too little time. And while many productivity hacks can help, there might be no bigger problem in your time management strategy than useless meetings.

Combining beginning meetings with an agenda, asking questions about the information, marking a change for progress, acknowledging each person as a necessary contributor, accountability, and creating urgency will result in productive meetings.

Setting formats on agendas, questions, and expectations produces an environment that eliminates meetings about old or future meetings.

Because meetings can be a huge waste of time. And too often, they are riddled with the common problems of starting late, running over, having unclear agendas, and not accomplishing much.

Blocking off your calendar can help avoid some meetings. You can say no to some. Or send a delegate. You can work with the organiser and other participants to sharpen things up on the agenda and preparation for the meetings you must attend.

Be thoughtful about your time, most importantly your meeting time. If you need to book meetings, avoid wasting additional time by using one of these 8 scheduling tools.