- The time spent in work meetings can rise as the year goes on, but a midyear reassessment may help.
- Technology isn't solely to blame for many of us having too many meetings.
- A corporate culture that doesn't value workers' time is the main problem, workplace experts told BI.
It's time for a midyear meeting purge.
There's a good chance the calendar you might have scrubbed clean months ago is again overgrown with meetings.
Data from the calendar management company Clockwise shows that time in meetings tends to go up as the year rolls on. And according to Matt Martin, the company's CEO and cofounder, that's true for everyone from rank-and-file workers to top execs.
Tidying up your calendar can boost your productivity and overall well-being — plus, it can save your employer a boatload of money. But hacking away at the corporate kudzu isn't always easy.
Martin noted that some organizations make an effort at the start of a year to cut out superfluous get-togethers. But meetings often creep back. And because some businesses are cyclical, our calendars can fill up as the workload increases, he said.
Inside many organizations, workers' time has become compromised, Martin said.
"You have this really valuable central resource, but nobody's responsible for it collectively," he said. "So it just gets exhausted and trampled."
It's not just a technology problem
It's easy to blame scheduling tools that let others see when you're free and make a land grab for any available 30-minute window in your day.
But Nir Eyal, author of "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life," told BI that a glut of meetings could be a symptom of cultural dysfunction. The ease of scheduling has just exacerbated — but not caused — the problem of failing to value workers' time properly, he said.
"Stupid meetings have been around since the beginning of the American corporate world," Eyal said. "What really put fuel on the fire was that now, we don't have to be in the same time and place to have a meeting."
Meantime, many of those meetings are too big and run too long.
Eyal said there are more efficient ways to share information. He pointed to the Amazon approach as one possibility: Jeff Bezos famously eschews slides in favor of "crisp" memos given to participants at the start of a meeting.
Other companies have tried various approaches to combat meetings' proliferation.
At Asana, the maker of productivity tools, Wednesdays are meant to be meeting-free. E-commerce platform Shopify introduced a tool in 2023 that estimates the cost of employees' time when someone goes to book a meeting to make people reconsider whether time on the calendar is necessary.
And Jensen Huang, head of the AI chip giant Nvidia, has some 50 direct reports but doesn't do one-on-ones with them.
However they're structured, meetings shouldn't be used for things like generating ideas, Eyal said, adding that the optimal number of participants in a brainstorming session should be capped at two.
The primary purpose of meetings should be to gain consensus, he said. Otherwise, they're too costly.
"If you break down people's time by the hour, it's incredibly expensive to have eight people sitting around a room just chit-chatting about brainstorming topics. It's a really bad idea," he said. People involved in a meeting need to decide what the point of the gathering is — and to have a clear agenda.
You can audit your meetings every week
Laura Vanderkam, author of "Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters," told BI that workers shouldn't wait to audit their meetings a couple of times a year.
She suggests taking time on Fridays to look to the following week to see what can be trimmed.
"There's always something on there — like the meeting that's been rescheduled four times. It's not going to happen this week either," she said.
Vanderkam said many meetings are often just "schedule clutter" that a coworker in need of an answer about something might have set up. You can approach the meeting organizer — maybe by picking up the phone — and suggest you'd like some more information about the forthcoming meeting so you can be prepared. A quick chat might be enough to make that meeting unnecessary, she said.
However we do it, finding ways to pluck catchups from our calendars c a help. That's the case even though we're spending less time in meetings than during the pandemic when some of the newly work-from-home set were craving connection — and when some bosses wanted to check up on their people.
While a diary diet might be in order, it's not as if all appointments are bad. Ron Hetrick, senior labor economist at the research firm Lightcast, previously told BI that meetings done right can help colleagues work through problems.
If you do have one-on-ones with your boss — assuming you don't report to Jensen Huang — there are ways to make them more effective.
Yet too many meetings can be too much. Martin, the CEO of Clockwise, which works with companies like Netflix and Uber, encourages organizations to examine their cultures around meetings — and look for ways to trim what's unnecessary.
"Some organizations and some individuals do God's work at the start of the year by trying to clear out meetings, but they come back," he said. "They always come back."