I’ve definitely written about this already on this blog – but lets revisit again… and again until it sinks in.

Unnecessary meetings are the bane of most knowledge workers’ existence, but we struggle to click ‘decline’ or not schedule a meeting in the first place. Otter.AI claims some people can spend up to 35% of their time in a meeting. Although one glance at my husband’s calendar I’d say its probably more than 70%. My own calendar is probably 25% unless there is something super important happening at work.

Take a look at your calendar and find the last meeting that had more than two people. Put in the number of people, the salary range of each person, and the length of the meeting. Then you can calculate how much money that meeting cost your company. Consider your meeting’s purpose. Did you achieve what you wanted? Did everyone need to be there? Did you get an outcome that will help your business? It’s great if the answer is ‘yes’. However, most meetings prevent employees from completing their work, are unproductive and inefficient, and interrupt people’s deep thinking.

Researchers from Atlassian found that people wasted 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings, and that half of all meetings were time-wasters. It’s not that meetings should be stopped altogether, but they can play a vital role in knowledge sharing and decision-making. In hybrid environments, it’s important to facilitate moments of connection between teams when doing so. But if you find yourself talking to other people about how busy you are or scheduling in calls when your calendar is empty, you might be suffering from productivity guilt.

Most people don’t really want to attend meetings, but they also don’t want to miss out on important information, so they attend anyway. However, this isn’t really providing us with any useful data, so we should use quality of work instead. Many people feel pressure to attend every meeting they’re invited to, but I suggest reframing your thinking, using the ‘optional’ functionality on meeting invites, and weighing up the costs involved before sending out that invitation.

When we see other people engaging in a conversation and nodding along, it’s easy to think we’re the odd one out for feeling frustrated by another meeting eating into our work time. This phenomenon is called pluralistic ignorance, and it’s not exclusive to meetings. So start cancelling meetings you don’t think will add value, scheduling meeting-free time in everyone’s diaries, and setting up team norms around employees’ time at work.