Approach > agendas
“Nobody ever sets an agenda for a meeting. You only get notes if someone sets the AI to record,” he said.
This came up during a chat about productivity apps and their uses. It’s been a bugbear of his for years. He’s a meeting purist. For me, I think Patrick Lencioni said it best:
“We have to stop focusing on agendas and minutes and rules, and accept the fact that bad meetings start with the attitudes and approaches of the people who lead and take part in them.” - Patrick Lencioni
Don’t get me wrong. I like a good agenda as much as the next person. It’s important that everyone attending a meeting knows why they’re there. Sharing information in advance is an act of inclusion, helping anxious or neurodiverse colleagues prepare.
But we’ve lost the art, not of agenda management, but of giving ourselves the time we need to prepare. It’s hard to turn up for a meeting and ensure that it’s a high-quality affair when you spend the rest of your time running between other calls and emergencies.
“The problem you’re describing is busyness,” I replied. “No app in the world is going to fix that.”
Wrecking ball
I’ve written before about how Covid wrecked my approach to calendar management. How the global move to online meetings has made more demands on our availability, often unsustainably so. While I talked there about ensuring we gave ourselves a chance to breathe between meetings, I didn’t put enough value on the time needed to prepare and complete actions resulting from those meetings.
Without this additional space, we go from meeting to meeting, wearing busyness like a badge of honour, hoping to catch up with the topic at hand on the fly. We agree to actions, and hope we can find time to get them done, either fitting what we can in just before the next call, or using larger meetings as an opportunity to multi-task, especially repeating ones where we’re less likely to be asked a question or called to participate.
Performance art
Do we need to be at all these meetings, or have we fallen into the trap of performative attendance? Has the full calendar become a weird sort of virtue or value-signalling. Look how busy I am! I have no time to do anything because I’m permanently in meetings! The result, bizarrely, is that the meetings become less and less valuable, because there’s no space between them to think or prepare.
The work that actually moves the organisation forward - the relationship building, the creative thinking gets buried under the mountain of meetings. Has being seen become more valuable than being seen to have done the work?
If so, how do we go from performance art to driving business performance?
The treadmill of doom
The tools aren’t going to save us. The idea that meeting hygiene is going to solve these systemic issues is risible. AI might make it easy to share notes, but if we’re all too busy to read them, let alone edit them and make them coherent before sharing, what’s the point? We’re burning even more energy to go nowhere.
Getting off this treadmill is going to take some decisions.
Make time
Give yourself space to recover and to catch up. Besides giving yourself recovery time outside meetings, give yourself some time to complete any actions, catch up or readings. If your calendar is filling up uncontrollably, take a long hard look at the meetings lined up for you, and make some ruthless choices about attendance or delegation. If you’re one of ten people who never say anything at a regular catch-up, you’re not adding value to anyone by being there. You can drop out or at least attend less regularly. Don’t keep stressing yourself out by performatively attending and multitasking in the background.
Call it out
If a meeting is meandering off-point, don’t be frightened to be the person who calls it back to order. “What problem are we trying to solve here?” is a polite but firm way of getting a meeting back on track. Most people are secretly wishing for someone to call out a meandering meeting. They just don’t want to be the ones to do it. People will thank you. Maybe not out loud, but they will thank you.
Escape the busyness trap
We all want to be good colleagues, to be co-operative, but there’s nothing wrong with calling time on bad meeting practices. I don’t mean agendas and minutes. I mean attending with intent and getting work done in the meeting. The work that’s supposed to be happening, not the Slacking in the background.
We’ve normalised bad meeting practice. But there is an opportunity to refocus, to enable us to return to having good conversations that move things forward. We just need to focus on the right things, and give ourselves the chance to succeed. Let’s make the most of our working hours.
Time doesn’t fly in bad meetings. It dies there.