How to avoid spending more than four hours a day in poorly run meetings

According to a study from November 2021, the average knowledge worker spends 21.5 hours in meetings each week. That’s more than four hours every single workday – half of the standard 40-hour workweek.

Intriguingly, that number has been up over 50% since the beginning of the pandemic. In February 2020, professionals spent just 14.2 hours in meetings per week. Thus, we’re now forced to put in an additional 7 hours (!) of meetings into our schedules each week.

In line with these numbers, research by collaboration expert Rob Cross found that poorly run meetings are the biggest time sink in organizations. In his book “Beyond Collaboration Overload”, he points to a solution: “When meetings follow an appropriate degree of organization and process for the task at hand, work output and efficiency greatly improve”.

Based on this notion, I’ve systematized best practices to avoid collaboration overload from meetings into three categories: 1) having meetings for the right tasks at hand, 2) setting up meetings with the appropriate degree of organization and process, and 3) conducting meetings accordingly. Today’s post is about the first category.

Many of us tend to have meetings for the wrong task at hand. As Nir Eyal writes in his book “Indistractable”: “Meetings are for consensus building. With few exceptions, creative problem-solving should occur before the meeting, individually or in very small groups”. However, instead of first putting in the hard work of coming up with a potential solution by ourselves, we often resort to throwing a meeting at a problem. By involving others, we can avoid the hard work of solving that demanding problem on our own, and also feel productive and appear busy.

While that approach saves us some time and work in the short term, it backfires quickly. By throwing meetings at a problem instead of first “doing the work” ourselves, we inspire our co-workers to do the same. Due to the nature of meetings, we thus drive collaboration overload exponentially. If four participants meet up for one hour, that amounts to half a day’s worth of work. With each co-worker we include in those meetings, we exponentially increase the likelihood of being pulled into similar meetings ourselves.

The solution may not be easy, but it is quite simple. Instead of throwing meetings at challenging problems, first come up with a potential solution yourself. Only then have a meeting to present that solution to your co-workers, and build consensus to put you on the right path forward. 

Over the next two weeks, I will go deeper into having an appropriate degree of organization and process when setting up and having meetings. Stay tuned!

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Until next week,Christian