When you get to work in the morning, what is the first thing that you do? I mean, after getting the cup of coffee and cinnamon-swirl danish.

Do you check your calendar to see what meetings you have to attend throughout the day? Did you schedule all of those meetings? If not, your time is being largely managed by other people.

Do you feel that your attendance at those meetings constitutes the greatest value that you can be providing for your company today? If not, are you satisfied with that fact, day after day?

The Problem With Too Many Meetings

I am not suggesting that someone else’s meetings are not important, or that your attendance at those meetings isn’t valuable. But all too often, there are significant dysfunctions that result from a meeting-oriented culture:

• Jumping from meeting to meeting is context shifting and introduces an element of waste each time you change context; some studies suggest 20% or more.²

• Meetings are generally aligned to hour or half-hour boundaries and tend to last exactly as long as they are scheduled. Does it really make sense that for a 1-hour meeting, we always have exactly 1 hour of stuff to discuss? If there was really 45 minutes worth of useful discussion that expanded to fit the time allotted, that’s another 25% waste. If there was really 75 minutes worth of useful discussion to be had and it was cut short by 15 minutes, then you will suffer from some serious additional waste.  First there is the waste in calendar time due to the fact that the topic under discussion must wait another week (or whatever the recurring meeting period, or duration before the newly scheduled followup meeting can take place) to make progress.  In addition, unless your attendees are robots, they will forget most of the discussion and conclusions reached by the time the next meeting rolls around and you will all waste time getting on the same page again.

• Many meetings are perfunctory. They recur weekly or biweekly, regardless of the optimal frequency.  Perhaps they have been on the calendar for a long time and their usefulness is starting to decline, in which case it would make sense to decrease the meeting duration or frequency, but this is rarely done until more time is wasted.

• Often times, the meeting has the wrong people. One too many is wasteful. One too few is wasteful to the rest of the attendees. You can easily tell when you are in a useless, perfunctory meeting or one which has too many attendees because many of the people will be processing other work on their laptops, thereby only half listening. More waste.

Considering all of these potential dysfunctions, I am simply suggesting the possibility of adopting a different mindset when you go to work&emdash;a mindset driven by the lean principle of eliminating waste.

Lean Time Management

What if you planned each day around the objective of providing the greatest impact that you can possibly provide that day?

Might you find yourself with more time to make a difference?

How would your job satisfaction change?

If everyone adopted that mentality, do you think your company would make greater progress toward its objectives?

What about collaboration – doesn’t this approach run counter to that core agile principle?

Assuming that all collaborators have a similar view of the value of the issue at hand, they will all be meeting the criteria for this principle. And, clearly, if you collaborated as needed and not as scheduled, you would be more efficient.

If you think your department, organization, or company is ready for a meeting reset, consider doing a meeting audit. Or, even better, wipe the calendar clean and start over with a new mind set. I’ll bet you’ll see a positive change.

Notes:

1. Photo courtesy Creative Commons License, @boetter’s photostream
2. Original source: Weinberg, Gerald. Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking, Dorset House, 1991.