Dilbert had a lot of great productivity and time management tips hidden amongst the humor, one of which was an important step to protecting one’s time when there’s a meeting request. The principle itself is sound: Make sure a meeting is absolutely necessary before you commit to it.
Just because someone has requested a meeting doesn’t mean you have to agree to it. Before hitting YES on that calendar invite, do a little research:
- What’s the purpose of the meeting?
- Is there an attendee list? Are you part of the agenda or contributing to the overall discussion or were you invited because someone was covering all the possible people who might want to be at the meeting?
- Is there an agenda with specific presenters, goals, and actions?
- Is a meeting the right format for this purpose?
If you don’t know all this information or it doesn’t exist, it’s possible you don’t need to be at this meeting or that this meeting doesn’t need to take place at all. Could an email or phone call accomplish the purpose? Is this a Slack or Teams conversation? Could a group work on a shared online document and accomplish the purpose?
If meetings are simply a big part of your work life, there are ways to maintain productivity.
- Schedule all your meetings in blocks. It will make for a long Wednesday – or Tuesday and Thursday mornings – but then your meetings, or ideally most of them, will be done for the week.
- Regular meetings should have a set day and time to avoid having to coordinate schedules constantly. The added advantage to this is that other meetings can be scheduled around these times.
- Come prepared. There’s nothing worse than attending a meeting where one or more attendees aren’t prepared and thus additional meetings are required. Don’t let that be you.
- Don’t leave the meeting without clear action items for next steps.
- If you’re the one scheduling, set it for the shortest time block possible. Just because the calendar defaults to one hour increments that doesn’t mean you can’t set a 15 minute meeting. Work expands to fit the time allotted to it so keep the agenda tight and the meeting on track.
Your time is precious and you must be vigilant about guarding it so take Dilbert’s advice and make your meetings matter.
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