Why and How to Break Your Addiction to Meetings

By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker

August 16, 2014

You are probably having too many meetings, for too long, and with too many people.

Consider a weekly meeting with five people that lasts one hour, held every week throughout the school year. Here is the math:

5 people x 1 hour = 5 cumulative personnel hours per week

5 hours x 36 weeks = 180 hours

180 hours = approximately 4.5 weeks of time devoted to this one recurring meeting

What could you and your staff accomplish with an extra 4.5 weeks each year?

Consider also the cost of a typical faculty meeting. Assume an hour-and-a-half weekly meeting devoted to sharing information, with 20 teachers and one administrator in attendance.

21 people x 1.5 hours x 36 weeks = 1,134 cumulative personnel hours

At a conservative average teacher salary of $35,000 and an administrator salary of $50,000 — neither figure including benefits — the cumulative personnel cost for that weekly faculty meeting is:

Teacher salary cost: $31,487

Administrator salary cost: $2,142

Total annual meeting cost: $33,629

If you perform a similar calculation for all of the meetings held in your school throughout the year, you will gain a sobering picture of what meetings cost in time and money.

Meetings are inevitable, needed, and helpful. Too many meetings, held too long, with too many people, wastes time and money, frustrates your best people, and lowers morale.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Elizabeth Grace Saunders offers a wry definition of the modern manager:

Manager, noun.

Textbook Definition: An individual who is in charge of a certain group of tasks, or a certain subset of a company. A manager often has a staff of people who report to him or her.

Modern Translation: An individual who races through the halls in a frantic attempt to make the next meeting on time while also answering e-mails on his or her mobile device.

She goes on to write:

You can’t give other people what you don’t have. So if you’re confused and scattered, your team will be too. You need to make time to get clear on what you want to achieve out of every interaction; this means spending more time on priorities, prep, and follow-up, and less time in meetings. Reducing your meeting time so you have more time to think strategically will require a group effort, but you can make it happen with some simple strategies.

Here is how to break your addiction to meetings. I have adapted, revised, and added to Saunders’s original suggestions.

Before accepting a meeting invitation, ask yourself: “Do I really need to attend?” If the answer is no, decline or consider one of these less time-intensive alternatives.

Ask for a pre-meeting look at the agenda so you can pass your comments to the facilitator to share. This may also prompt the facilitator to prepare an agenda in the first place.

Ask whether the issue, or your participation, can be handled more effectively with a phone call or an email. If so, do not hold a meeting. Send someone else to communicate your position and request a copy of the meeting notes afterward. A useful test: “If I were sick on the day of this meeting, would it need to be rescheduled?” If the answer is no, you likely do not need to attend.

If you must attend a meeting only to provide strategic input — not to assist with tactical implementation — request that your portion of the discussion occur at the beginning. Then excuse yourself.

Do you schedule meetings where you spend most of the time talking, perhaps giving updates to a room of people quietly checking their phones? Do you default to hour-long meetings? If so, consider changing your default.

Your default should be to choose the least costly time investment that still accomplishes the goal. Do not schedule a meeting for something that can be resolved with a phone call, and do not make a phone call for something that can be communicated in an email.

When meetings are necessary, make them leaner. Try thirty-minute or even fifteen-minute meetings and set a goal to finish early. If you consistently need more time, you can adjust — but with increased focus, you often will not.

Standup and walking meetings are worth considering as well. They tend to be shorter and more efficient, less formal, and healthier.

Once you are modeling good meeting habits, ask your direct reports to do the same.

Do not schedule meetings for items that can be communicated by email. Reserve meetings for discussions and decisions that must happen with a team, in real time. Send a clear agenda with the meeting invitation — not two minutes before — so that everyone can assess whether they need to attend. Designate someone to take thorough notes on the discussion, the decisions made, and the reasoning behind them, and circulate those notes to anyone who needs to be informed but did not need to attend.

Seize the time you recover before it disappears. As you transition from a reactive to a proactive posture, you may feel disoriented by the open space on your calendar. Fill it deliberately with actual work — before the time expands to accommodate busyness.

Block time for email, meeting preparation, one-on-ones with direct reports, and strategic thinking. Honor those commitments to yourself as you would to others, so that you — and those who depend on you — can trust that the work will get done.

I have found it effective to block project time and pre- and post-meeting preparation time on my calendar. The result has been measurable gains in productivity.

Writing for the American Management Association, Jon Petz advises:

Stamp out “Over-Invitation Syndrome.” … Stop cannibalizing time. Invite only the key stakeholders who can then elect to invite others on their team as needed. The ability of a group to make a decision exponentially decreases as the number of attendees increases. Invite people solely based on their value in the meeting.

Research and experience both support the value of shorter, more focused meetings. Challenge yourself to contain routine meetings to twenty-two minutes. The discipline of a firm time limit sharpens preparation, focuses discussion, and respects everyone’s time.

Summary

By cutting down on the number of meetings you attend and lead, you free the people around you to make reasonable decisions without always looking to you for input. That will reduce the meetings you need to attend and build confidence in your team. If you use the recovered time to shape strategy and set clear priorities, your team will make sound decisions whether or not you are in the room.

You will save time and money — and your staff will thank you for it.

Note: The meeting cost calculations above are based on a normal 36-week school year, a seven-period day, and conservative salaries not including benefit costs. Readers should perform their own calculations using figures appropriate to their schools.