I dislike meetings. Or rather I should say I dislike bad meetings, you know the ones where you go “Why am I wasting my time here?” or “Why are we talking about this when the time to fix the thing that we’re talking about literally takes half the time to just do”1.
I think the problem with bad meetings stems from most people not having thought about meetings. How to host or participate in meetings is not a thing that we are taught in school or university. Maybe it should be. I’m very pleased that I happened upon the podcast episode “How to Make Meetings Less Terrible” from Freakonomics2 back in the day. I forgot about it for a little while though. But during the past year I’ve been in a role that has required me to host more meetings and in order to not become what I despise, a bad meeting host, then I’ve revisited this particular episode. I’ve also done a bit of digging around the World Wide Web and found some fairly reasonable advice, especially from this thread about what others think could lead to better meetings3. Anyway without further ado then here are the distilled thoughts I have on the matter (at least at the time of writing).
Meeting recipe
- Purpose of the meeting
- Set a goal/desired outcome for the meeting, e.g. “Having decided on which programming language we’ll use for making the super cool service”
- Context
- Provide context that’s needed for the attendees to have valuable input on the goal, e.g. “We are about to endeavor on a journey of building a super cool service that bills our customers, it needs to run on these old legacy systems which can only run programs that are <1MB including dependencies”
- Agenda
- Have a clear agenda with time slots for each point, e.g.:
- Context (go through the purpose of the agenda, the context, and the purpose of the meeting) [5 min.]
- These are the programming languages we can facilitate [5 min.]
- Weighing the pros and cons [25 min.]
- Deciding on a programming language [10 min.]
- Have a clear agenda with time slots for each point, e.g.:
Meeting considerations
- Be mindful of how many people you invite and their time’s worth
- This should give you an indicator as to how well you need to be prepared, i.e. the cost of the meeting should be proportional to the amount that you prepare – there is a lower limit though so even if it’s just one or two folks then you better f*cking prepare!
- Be mindful of Parkinson’s law4
- Given the outcome how long should the meeting be? Don’t ever default to an hour meeting, could 45 min. do it? Could 30 min. do it? Also, given the previous point then remind yourself that there’s time around the meeting that should be counted towards the cost, i.e. having a 5 min. meeting probably costs upwards of 35 min. per person given a 15 min. buffer in both directions
- Be mindful of who you invite
- Will they be able to contribute in a meaningful way? Or is it important that they are given deeper context than the summary of said meeting and therefore should be invited?
- Be mindful of the purpose of the meeting
- Literally ask yourself “Could this be a message instead?”