27 September 2023

Simple strategies to counter meeting fatigue

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May Busch* has some advice for those leaders in middle management who find their day consists of going from one meeting to another.


My coaching client Sara (not her real name) had recently taken on a bigger leadership role and things were going well with one exception. She could not manage her time well.

At the root of the issue was that she had too many meetings.

“I’m in back-to-back meetings all day. There’s no time to get work done, much less to have time to think, plan and be strategic,” she told me.

“In fact, I barely have time to go to the bathroom or grab lunch.”

Then, when an emergency meeting popped up, her assistant had to scramble to reschedule all those meetings.

It was practically a full-time job that kept her assistant from getting anything else done.

Some meetings spring up unasked no matter how hard you try to protect your time.

Others are ones you want to have, but they grow until they’ve taken up all your available time.

It can feel good at first. After all, being important enough to be in meetings means you’re ‘in demand’. Successful people are supposed to be busy, right?

Then you start noticing how little gets done in those meetings and you start to resent them. How do you make it stop?

Some meetings you won’t be able to do anything about — like your boss’s regular team meeting.

For those you control or at least influence, there’s a strategy that we devised for Sara.

This was zero-based calendaring. It’s based on the accounting concept of zero-based budgeting, where you start from a zero base every period.

When applied to your calendar, it means you take all the recurring meetings out of your calendar — in this case, the ones you control.

This resets your meeting count to zero. Only then do you look at each one and see if a case can be made for putting it back in.

Sara took all of her regular meetings — the ones she ran — and paused them over the summer.

If people needed her, they could email or call to schedule an ad hoc session.

She also created monthly ‘office hours’ to ensure team members knew they could stop by if needed.

That gave her breathing room to get a lot done, plan ahead and even have time left for herself.

To her surprise, she discovered that most meetings didn’t need to happen at all.

Very few people needed her office hours and the volume of ad hoc consultations added up to far less than all those regular standing meetings.

It turned out those weekly meetings with each team member were producing more work and less results.

Team members had been using valuable time and energy trying to come up with content for their regular meetings with Sara.

Rather than being a real exchange of ideas, these regular meetings had become more of a ‘show-and-tell’ session where Sara didn’t really get to know team members as people.

Zero-based calendaring also made life easier for Sara’s assistant.

With more clear space in the calendar, she could fit in important events, like the Department head’s town hall meeting, without constantly having to rearrange Sara’s schedule.

Finally, Sara had time to think strategically which allowed her to make more valuable contributions in her boss’s meetings and be seen as a senior leader on top of her game.

However, not every meeting is a waste of time, and sometimes the issue isn’t having a meeting but rather the way you’re having the meeting.

So before you throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water, start by doing a dry run for yourself.

If you’re uneasy about putting all the meetings you run on hold for a month or two, start by analysing them first.

Remember, you’re not cancelling the meetings forever, just putting them on pause.

As you look for candidates, here are a few signs that your recurring meeting may be due for a pause.

People aren’t engaged

They show up because they have to, but you have to admit that they’re often distracted and even bored.

They’re on their devices, passing notes to each other or daydreaming.

You feel stressed

Maybe taking a break would give everyone the room to see what they miss about it.

Maybe they could be shorter, less frequent or have a different agenda.

Very little gets accomplished

There’s lots of discussion but then nothing happens. You end up having a similar discussion the next time.

Having a meeting is overkill

Things do get accomplished, but you could get the same results in a shorter call or email exchange.

The meeting has outlived its original purpose

Too often, we start off with the right intentions and the meetings are useful.

However, we allow them to drift on even after their usefulness is no longer there.

Like the task force whose project is concluded or a daily crisis meeting that continues even after the crisis has calmed down.

Pausing your meetings and forcing each meeting to be justified before it goes back on your calendar is a wonderful discipline.

So protect yourself and those around you from the tyranny of too many meetings by reassessing the meetings you run.

*May Busch works with smart entrepreneurs and top managements to build their businesses. She can be contacted at [email protected].

This article first appeared at maybusch.com.

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