Downward angle icon Downward angle icon. According to Calendly, Wednesday was the busiest day for meetings in 2023. Rudzhan Nagiev/Getty Images The amount of time spent in work meetings is likely to increase as the year progresses, but a mid-year reassessment might help. Technology isn’t the only reason so many of us are meeting-heavy; company cultures that don’t value workers’ time are the main problem, workplace experts told BI.
It’s time to organize the mid-term meeting.
There’s a good chance that the calendar you wiped clean a few months ago is now full of meetings again.
Data from calendar-management company Clockwise shows that meetings tend to get longer as the year progresses, and this applies to everyone from rank-and-file employees to C-level executives, says Clockwise CEO and co-founder Matt Martin.
A clean calendar can improve productivity and overall well-being, and save your employer a lot of money, but clearing out the corporate crap isn’t always easy.
Martin noted that some organizations made efforts to eliminate non-essential gatherings at the start of the year, but meetings are becoming more common again, and some businesses are cyclical, meaning calendars can fill up as workload increases, he said.
In many organizations, workers’ time is being sacrificed, Martin said.
“You have a very valuable central resource, and no one is taking responsibility for collectively managing it,” he said, “so it gets depleted and trampled.”
It’s not just a matter of technology
It’s easy to blame scheduling tools that let other people see your availability and steal 30 minutes of free time from your day.
But Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, told BI that meeting excess could be a sign of cultural dysfunction: Schedulability only exacerbated the problem of employees not being able to properly value their time, he said.
“Stupid meetings have been around since the beginning of corporate America,” Eyal says, “but what’s added fuel to the fire is that now meetings don’t have to be held at the same time and place.”
However, many of these meetings are too big and too long.
Eyal said there are more efficient ways to share information, including one possibility: Jeff Bezos famously eschews slides, preferring “simple” notes he hands to participants at the start of meetings.
Other companies have also tried different approaches to combat the rise in meetings.
At productivity tool maker Asana, Wednesdays are designated a meeting-free day, while e-commerce platform Shopify has introduced a tool in 2023 that estimates the cost of an employee’s time when someone books a meeting, in a bid to make people reconsider whether they need the time on their calendar.
Jensen Huang, the boss of AI chip maker Nvidia, has about 50 direct reports but never meets one-on-one with them.
No matter how the meeting is structured, it should not be used to generate ideas, Eyal said, adding that the optimal number of participants in a brainstorming session should be limited to two.
The main purpose of the meeting should be to reach an agreement, he says, otherwise it would be too expensive.
“If you calculate people’s time by the hour, it would be incredibly expensive to have eight people sitting in a room chatting about a brainstorming topic. It’s a really bad idea,” he said. People attending a meeting need to determine what the purpose of the gathering is and have a clear agenda.
You can audit your meetings weekly
Laura Vanderkam, author of Calm by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Quiet the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters, told BI that workers shouldn’t wait to audit a few meetings a year.
She suggests taking time on Friday to figure out what you can cut back on for the following week.
“There’s always something written there, like a meeting that’s been rescheduled four times and it’s not going to happen this week either,” she said.
Vanderkam said many meetings are often just “schedule clutter” set up by coworkers who want answers about something. You can approach the meeting organizer (e.g., via phone) and let them know you’d like a bit more information about the upcoming meeting so you can prepare. A quick conversation might make the meeting unnecessary, he said.
Whatever the method, finding a way to get events off your calendar can help, even if people are spending less time in meetings than they did during the pandemic, when people who started working from home were eager to connect and managers wanted to check in on their employees.
While the diary diet may be in order, not all schedules are bad. Ron Hetrick, senior labor economist at research firm Lightcast, previously told BI that well-run meetings can help coworkers solve problems.
If you have a one-on-one meeting with your manager (if you don’t report to Jensen Huang), there are ways to make the meeting more effective.
But too many meetings can be too taxing, and Martin, CEO of Clockwise, which works with companies like Netflix and Uber, encourages organizations to examine their meeting culture and look for ways to cut back on the unnecessary ones.
“Some organizations and individuals do God’s work by eliminating meetings at the beginning of the year, but they come back,” he said. “They always come back.”
