One of the most common time management challenges working women have is that their work hours are dominated by meetings, pushing heads-down work into nights and weekends. Let’s talk about what to do if this is your work life.
Referenced episodes:
- Ep. 43. Five Strategies to Improve Your Meetings
- Ep. 4. How to Prioritize in a Way that Actually Works
- Ep. 23. Managers v. Makers (And What It Means for Your Schedule)
A full transcript will appear here within two weeks of the episode being published.
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Full Transcript
Ep 81. Too Many Meetings
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! And welcome back! All right, I’ve recently asked on Instagram what are people’s main pain points, like time management pain points, when it comes to work and their personal lives, and on the work front, the resounding answer was too many meetings. There were a lot of other pain points too, which we’ll dig into over time, but the most common one I saw was, “Too many meetings, too many meetings, too many meetings, not enough time to do real work.”
And so, obviously, I want to address this. I also want to point out if you are a manager, an executive, a leader within your organization, that is also very much how probably people are feeling right now. And so, it’s just great. We’ll discuss it today on what you can do if you have too many meetings but also if you’re a manager and maybe you’re not feeling that way, really kind of putting yourself in the shoes of the people who work for you and getting creative about how can we help them as well free up time so that they can do that other work. So we’re gonna kind of address both of those elements and angles of this today.
Your One Main Overarching Goal – 1:35
Now, when I talk about meetings what I tend to do is kind of talk about and jump straight to let’s look at your standing meetings, which we’re gonna talk about today. Before we do that, I thought it would be really helpful to take a step back, no matter what role you’re in, manager, maker, or anything in between. Take a step back and first get very clear on what is the top priority in your organization, your department, your team, whatever it might be for right now. So let’s say over the next three months, six months, twelve months, whatever it is, what is the main goal that your department is striving for?
Now, there are organizations this is less relevant in. I’ll say like in law this was maybe not quite as relevant. It was like what cases do you have on your plate. But typically I would say, also, lawyers aren’t the ones that are overwhelmed by meetings. It’s usually a symptom of corporate culture, and in a corporation, I find that one of the trickiest parts is that there are just too many priorities, too many cross-department priorities being thrown at different departments, things like that. And so, I think before we dig into the meetings, particularly if you are in a corporate environment, it is worth thinking about and just getting really clear on what is that one main overarching goal right now.
Now, as I’ve talked about in prior episodes, that doesn’t mean you only have one project. I’m not saying that. But getting really clear on are we launching a product right now, are we supporting this development of this technology right now, is this big board meeting coming up the main priority right now, are we launching a new website, are we launching a new product. Whatever it might be, there’s one big thing that takes priority over everything else. Obviously, some things like the repetitive stuff and things like that have to happen, but there’s one big driving force right now, and then a couple projects might serve that. There might be three different projects that go into that, but having the clarity on what is the main priority right now for your organization, department, team, whatever it might be gives you a lot of clarity.
I’ve talked about this in prior episodes, and it’s obviously easier said than done. But that will be very helpful as we evaluate what meetings you’re in, is if you have the clarity of what is the main goal that we’re working towards right now. I’ve talked about it more in the framework of managing how many projects we have on our plate and picking which projects to go with. I really want to prioritize the projects that serve that main priority and then eliminate other things because I’m a huge proponent that good prioritization requires you and your team to have the time and the energy to meet that top priority, so we don’t just try and cram everything else in on top of that high priority. We really need to make space for it.
That’s a big topic. I know that I’m kind of rambling a bit. I talk about it more in episode four about prioritizing. It’s also something that’s an ongoing conversation with clients, and again, I know it’s simpler said than done but sometimes we really need to bring people back to the basics. If you are unclear about what that main driving force is, what I would do is have a conversation at this point with a leader that would help give you light on that, and I would have a proposal where you can say, “I just want to get clear on what our main goal is right now so I can manage my workload. What right now is our top priority? Is it launching this thing? Is it launching this other thing? Is it all these other things, and I’m just trying to be able to understand how to prioritize my own projects and having that clarity on that main thing will help me do that.”
Evaluate Your Meeting Workload – 5:18
Once you have that clarity on the next three months, six months, twelve months, this is the main thing, then I think you’re in a much better place to evaluate your meeting workload in light of that because now you suddenly have, in some sense, a metric by which to look at your meetings and say, “Is this serving that main thing, or is this not? Is this taking away time from working on that main thing, or is this serving it?” And I just find sometimes we look at meetings and we’re like, “I don’t know. It all looks important.” But if we have the clarity of what is the main thing we’re driving towards right now, that can really help, and it might be more nuanced than this. It might be this is the main thing we’re driving towards right now, so these three projects are really important, so these meetings that serve those projects are really important. And meetings outside of that scope are less important.
Meetings for Managers vs. Makers – 6:05
Now, I’m gonna turn to kind of more specifics of what types of meetings to look at and what to think about. But I wanted to also remind you — this is definitely an episode for people who have been here a while. I’m sorry if this is your very first episode. I’ll try and — maybe jump ship right now on this episode and listen to some of these others I reference. But episode four I mentioned is a really good one for prioritizing. Another one I’m gonna reference now is the manager/maker one, and I’ll list the number of the episodes in the show notes for this. But I just wanted to kind of set the stage with this and remind you of this, that the manager/maker distinction really comes into play here when it comes to meetings.
For a manager, their job is overseeing, moving projects forward, understanding where projects stand so they can help alleviate roadblocks and things like that. Meetings are a big part of that. A manager sees a lot of value in meetings because it’s helping them do their job. Makers, on the other hand, more individual contributor roles, really need more non-meeting time to do the work where they add the most value. And I just want to remind you of that distinction because as we talk about this, and especially if you’re a maker and need to talk to mangers, or as a manager you’re thinking about the meeting load for your team of makers, it’s really important to think about where people are bringing value and how, therefore, they might view meetings.
As a manager, you might be like, “I have an overwhelming amount of meetings, but it’s all really valuable.” Where your team might be like, “I have a lot of meetings, and it’s pulling me away from everything that’s valuable.” And I just want to remind people of this distinction as we talk meetings, because as we look over all these meetings, I just want that to be in mind. As a manager, I want you keeping an eye on making sure your team has enough maker time and that you have enough strategy time, because even though meetings are really where you have a lot of value, you also need that quiet time to really think strategy and be able to prioritize projects and make tougher decisions on eliminating and all that kind of stuff.
And as a maker, one thing that (as we’re gonna talk about) you might have to have a conversation about some of the meetings that you propose eliminating or at least bowing out of. But you just understand that your manager might see a lot of value in that. So it’s gonna be up to you to remind them that you need non-meeting time to do the work and also make that work visible. Remind them of what you need to be doing, not just in the meetings but outside of the meetings. And then also educating them about just how many meetings you’re in. They might have no idea. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about this, but before we dig into the practical of what meetings do we look at and what do we think about, I just want to remind you of you might have some conversations or you might need to think about other people in this that aren’t you and remind you of that manager/maker distinction so that we can kind of understand where each other are coming from here.
All right, and as I’ve alluded, if you are someone who can unilaterally make decisions about what meetings you hold, what meetings you go to, all that kind of stuff, just listen to the rest of this podcast with that lens and really think about it that way. If you can’t make those decisions, what I would love for you to do is listen to the rest of this podcast and use it to come up with a proposal that you can present to whoever can greenlight your involvement in meetings and whether meetings are even held with those decisions. Okay, so let’s dig into the practical.
Standing Meetings – 9:35
Standing meetings are a great target because, one, if you can eliminate a standing meeting, that’s a lot of bang for your buck in terms of you go through the process of eliminating and suddenly you’re freeing up an hour every week, an hour every month, whatever it might be. There’s a lot of bang for your buck in that regard. And also standing meetings are one of those things that can have a lot of value for a period of time and then lose value. So they can go stale, and so, just looking for standing meetings to eliminate is really a worthwhile endeavor and a good place to start.
What I recommend doing is at least once a quarter evaluate them in light of that high-priority thing we were talking about. The main high-priority goal you’re going for, once a quarter evaluate, “Is that still the priority?” Hopefully you’re doing that at other times as well, and then specific to meetings, “Are my meetings over the next month, including all these standing meetings, serving that function?” I’ll also suggest, and I’ll suggest at the end of the episode as well, potentially listening to this episode every three months, every quarter and using it to remind you to do this process.
All right, and when you are looking at standing meetings, one of the things, as I said, was, “Is this serving that main priority?” Another question would be, “Am I adding value?” And another question would be, “Am I getting value from this?” Now, I just want to note that these questions, you kind of have to use your judgment when thinking about them, but I think there’s a lot of value in thinking about them. You could be adding value, and you could be getting value out of it. But if it’s a project that’s not serving that main goal right now, it is taking away time and energy and focus, not just of the meeting, but of people’s prep time and follow-up time away from that top priority right now. And this is just something that’s really important here is sometimes I think we think, “Well, that is valuable. That meeting is valuable.” But if the ROI isn’t there and it’s essentially an opportunity cost from an activity that would serve your highest-priority stuff, then it’s not valuable enough to warrant taking up space and taking up space that could otherwise go to that high priority.
So you really just always have to think about not only just is there value, but is there ROI serving those top-priority things? Because if not, it’s that opportunity cost for things that could be going to serve that high priority. If it passes this test, then great. You continue on with it.
One thing to consider in that case scenario is even if it passes the test, do you want to have it that frequently? Does that meeting need to be every single week, or could it be every two weeks or every three weeks, or once a month, whatever it might be, but that’s still something to think about. Even if you’re like, “I want to keep this meeting,” could you make it less frequent? “Could you make it shorter? Could less people be involved so that you’re freeing up some of your team so that they have more time?” Those are all questions to think about even if the meeting passes, you decide to keep it.
If it doesn’t, if you’re like, “It doesn’t satisfy these questions,” or satisfy them enough to warrant the time it takes, then you have a couple options. One is eliminating the meeting entirely. I would say that often proposing that a lot of people — almost some people are getting real value out of it. I mean, a lot of people — I mean, I feel like everyone loves cancelled plans, and so, freeing up and canceling a meeting entirely might be welcome. You could bow out of it yourself. Maybe it makes sense for people from other departments to be still involved in this, but you could bow out of it. That’s an option. You could change the frequency, as I mentioned before, and you could also train somebody else to take over.
So if you are thinking, “I don’t really need to be here. Our department needs to be aware of this, but maybe someone more junior could sit in on this,” then that might make some sense to train someone up. And to me what that can look like is having them come with you for the next two or three meetings and then protecting the time to debrief with them after, saying, “What main takeaways did you see for our department? How would you communicate those? Who would you communicate them to?” and just make sure that you feel confident in their ability to issue spot and then communicate out after a meeting, and then you can really let that go. So it might require a little bit more work in the beginning, but then you can kind of transition it, delegate it out with a lot more peace of mind.
So just to recap for standing meetings, once a quarter I would evaluate them in light of the high priority at the time. I would ask, “Am I adding value? Am I getting value? And is this value contributing towards our top priority right now in the department?” If it is, great. You still might want to change up the frequency, change up how many people are there, things like that. And if it doesn’t pass muster on that front, you could eliminate it, you could propose bowing out or just bow out yourself if you have that ability to make that decision. You could change the frequency as we discussed, or you could train someone else to take over the meeting on your behalf.
One-Off Meetings – 14:41
For the more one-off meetings, obviously, these are a little bit different because eliminating them has a little bit less bang for your buck, even though it’s still awesome. And they tend to be less stale because they probably only got put on the calendar last week. They might have gone stale, in which case, great, but they’re usually less stale.
And so, that’s kind of a separate analysis. What I would think about are two things that I’ve mentioned in prior episodes. I think I have another episode on meetings and making them efficient. And so, I’ll link that in the show notes as well. But the two things that come to mind are, one, I always, always recommend having people have to — if someone is your peer or below in terms of hierarchy, if they want a meeting for you, they have to send you an agenda beforehand. If they don’t, what I frame it as is, “Hey, I see we have a meeting next week. Can you send me a quick and dirty agenda? It doesn’t have to be polished. Typos welcome. I just need an agenda to understand what we’re talking about,” and it just will help me prepare. Often, when you get that agenda, you will then either be able to hold a more efficient meeting because you know what it’s about, you can prepare for it, all that kind of stuff, and you can keep people to the agenda, and also you might be able to eliminate it entirely and you can be like, “Oh, I can answer this is a quick email. Let me just respond in an email.” It’s a really nice way to eliminate some meetings and even if the meetings that you do hold, the meetings you decide to hold, you will be much more efficient by doing it.
Another thing to consider when it comes to one-off meetings (and even standing meeting can apply with this as well) is if you can’t get rid of them on the front end, one thing you might want to consider doing is calendaring once or twice a week a skim of your upcoming meetings then looking for anything you can cancel. I find that often, I don’t think it’s the majority of the time, but often people end up holding a meeting that everyone knows could have been cancelled because things have changed between when it was booked and when it’s being held, but no one thought to try and cancel it before, and so, it becomes five minutes before and everyone’s like, “Well, I guess we better hold the meeting.” If on, let’s say, Tuesday mornings and — or I’m making this up. Let’s say even Monday afternoons and Wednesday mornings, you have a little reminder in your calendar to look ahead at the next three days of meetings and just say, “Could we eliminate any of these?” And you send out the email to those people and say, “Do we really need this meeting in light of whatever?” And you might be able to free some things up that you wouldn’t have otherwise just because everyone would have showed up to do it.
So those are just two quick tips on the one-off things is really demanding agendas where you can to make sure that it really does need to be a meeting, and then also canceling them.
Another thing I’ll add is that if you are frequently having meetings or being interrupted by the same people, consider really just setting a one-on-one standing meeting with them for a frequency that makes sense and having them corral everything into that. Yes, it’s technically adding another meeting, but in theory, it’s taking away other meetings and interruptions from your life, and so, that might serve you well there.
How to Approach The Conversation with Your Boss/Leader – 17:50
Now, I have three miscellaneous points I want to dig into. But before we do that, I just want to have a note for the people who can’t make these decisions unilaterally and have to have conversations with a boss or a leader about what your proposal is, like getting the green light to eliminate meetings or bow out of them or train something else up for whatever it might be. What I want to encourage you to do is, first of all, get very clear on what you would use the freed-up time for because if your boss hears, “I just don’t want to go to these meetings anymore. I have too much other work to do,” they might not know how to evaluate the value of the meeting versus your other work. Where if you can go in and say, “I would really like to get out of these three meetings. That would free up three hours of my week each week, and I would use that time to work on this project, this project, this repetitive task I have to do, and this thing, and that would really help reduce my stress and ensure that the value I’m bringing to these things is really –,” and you can even skip the stress if you want and really talk about the value you’re bringing to the department. That at least, to me, is a much more convincing argument. We’ve got to make our work visible to the people and remind them what they’re doing and the value it brings. So you don’t want the evaluation to lack context. You want them to be able to say not just meeting or no meeting but meeting or XYZ work that, really, they see the value in, and they need you to do. It’s just a different conversation and much more compelling, and so, just really get that clarity before you go in with the proposal.
In addition, I would really encourage you, potentially, to show them your calendar or be able to convey — count up the hours. If you don’t want to share your calendar, count up the hours each day that you’re in meetings. You could count up each day for the last two weeks and just have that data and say, “On average, I’m in meetings this many hours a day. I really have this many hours of work that I think I need to do. Obviously I can’t do all these things together, and so, therefore I would like to get out of these meetings, so I have this time to give to these projects.” And again, to the extent you can, anchor it in that main driving priority goal right now so that they are reminded of the priority in the context of all of this conversation.
Block Focus Time – 20:10
Okay, turning to the miscellaneous points, I am a big fan of blocking focus time. I’ve talked about that in prior episodes. I dig into this a lot more in the programs, but what I wanted to say here is really make sure you know what you’re doing during that time. What I don’t want people to do is just block focus time and that’s it, and then they roll up on it and they’re like, “Now, what do I do with this time?” This is something we work on inside the program is having the clarity of not just having the focus time but knowing what to do with it to give you the peace of mind that you’re looking for and feeling on top of it. And so, just be really aware of that.
Now, I also want to transition here into, though, people often block focus time and then it is completely ignored by other people in their organization. So a couple little thoughts here. One is instead of blocking, let’s say, a two-hour block once or twice a week for your focus time is blocking for 30-minute times, so they look like meetings and it’s not so clear that it’s just focus time. The more you can kind of camouflage this stuff like your focus time into meetings, the better you might be here. Do I think that’s right? No. Do I think people should respect focus time? Absolutely. But I’m a realist, and we’re gonna work with what we’ve got, and that is a solution that somebody else came up with, one of my clients that I thought was brilliant, and I think that it’s a really great way to have people respect your focus time more.
Now, let’s say that they still don’t. You still get invited to meetings when you have another meeting on the book, and by meeting here I mean let’s just say you get invited to something and you already had focus time in your calendar and were not available. A couple points here. I mean, one thing I’m curious about that really only you can answer is let’s pretend you had another important meeting at that time, and someone booked their meeting for that time, how do you handle that? That’s something that I don’t know, but really treat focus time as if it was a meeting that you couldn’t get out of with someone else. How do you handle that and handle it in the same way?
What I’m gonna say next might jive with that or it might not. What I want to say is something that might strike you as something you can’t do, and you might be right. So I’m gonna give an idea of something you could play with, and if you can’t do it, that’s totally fine. You know your situation better. But I just figured I’d float it and maybe challenge yourself a little bit beyond what you’re most, most comfortable with to see if it might work. Because I think all of this is an experiment, and so, it might be worth experimenting with. And it’s this. This is the approach. When someone books a meeting at a time when your calendar is blocked, you might want to consider taking it as your presence must not be critical for that meeting. Now, you can decide for yourself if you think it would be valuable for you to still be able to go to that meeting, but you could also take it as, “They don’t need my presence, and therefore, the only reason I should go to it is if I want to go to it, if I see the value and want to be there.” If so, if you want to go to this thing, then you could move things around or ask them to move that newly-scheduled meeting to allow you to be there. I’ll note that if you do that a couple times and ask them to keep moving the meeting, then either they’ll stop including you or they’ll stop scheduling it at a time that you can’t make it, which both outcomes might be great unless you actually really want to be there.
That said, if you decide that you actually don’t want to go, they schedule this meeting, they invite you, it’s on your calendar, but it’s at a time that you can’t make or you don’t want to make because of your focus time, then you have a couple options here. One is that you just don’t go without saying anything. If you’re asked later you could say, “Oh, I was already booked for that time. I assumed you were booked by booking it then. It was a bit more of a courtesy invite rather than an actual request for my time.” If that feels a little too aggressive, fair enough, totally get it. You could also send an email before the meeting just looping them into your decision not to go. Something like, “Hey, I see you booked a meeting about this thing for a time when I’m already booked. I assume that means that my invite was just a courtesy and that my presence isn’t critical for a successful meeting, and I agree. That said, I’m happy to weigh in on anything that needs my attention after the meeting if necessary.”
I’m just throwing these things out there. I’m not, again, saying that you have to do these things or that these are the right outcomes. You know your industry and your culture best. But I just wanted to open the door to that. If people are booking meetings when you’re not available, then maybe just start playing with this a little bit. “This was a courtesy invite, not an actual request for my time. I’m happy to weigh in outside of the meeting.” Whatever you might want to do with it, that might really help you free up some time and take the pressure off you feeling like you need to be at every single meeting even when those meetings are booked for times they were fully aware you were not available. I just think it’s really important that we, particularly as women, particularly my guess is there’s a fair number of people-pleasing women here, which I fully count myself as part of, it’s something I think I just want to point out and show you ways that you don’t need to bend over backwards to make everybody else’s schedule and desires and all of that work and that we do get to stand up for ourselves even when some subtlety is required for us to feel comfortable enough to do it. So just floating those ideas. Something to consider, and I would love to hear what you think!
Schedule Time For Upkeep – 25:38
The last miscellaneous point I want to share here is something that I alluded to before. The annoying thing about meetings, and honestly all time management, all email, all schedules, all demands on our time, all of it, it’s just one of those things that I wish we could just find the right balance and then we set it and forget it. But unfortunately new meetings come up. New projects come up. More email comes in. All of these schedules shift, and it requires recalibration and maintenance over time. And so, I just urge you to do this now but then also schedule time every three months to do it again, and hopefully it won’t require so much work, but it might. It might, and that’s okay because the work it requires has a longer-term pay off for the rest of those months going forward, and if you want to listen to this episode every three months, go for it. If you just want to distill the main points for you and put those in your calendar invite, that’s great too. But just really build in that maintenance because as much as we want to set it and forget it, it’s just not realistic, and we really want to make sure that your approach keeps pace with the evolution of your meetings and your work as well.
All right, I hope you got a good gem or two out of there that you can experiment with, just play with, and see how it goes. Try it a few times. Don’t give up right away. Really give it a good shake and see what you like and don’t like. And if you enjoyed this episode, I would so appreciate it if you would share it with a friend. I think that I would say most women, especially working in corporate, experience this issue. And so, feel free to share it around. Hopefully others will get a good gem out of it as well.
Thank you for being here, and I will catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
