How to have fewer meetings?

This post is written by Mohit Mamoria, Co-founder & CEO of Mailman. A Gmail plugin that spaces out the delivery of your emails, so you only get them at designated times. This helps you spend less time in your inbox, and more time doing quality deep work. You can sign up for a free trial at mailmanhq.com

Research shows, meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, to the point where executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.

That said, it’s time we ask this question-

Are all these meetings necessary?

Absolutely not.

While meetings are great for enabling collaboration, creativity, and innovation. They adversely impact the amount of work that gets done.

If employees are spending all day in meetings, they have less time to do heads-down work.

The solution: Have fewer meetings 👨‍💻

How to implement? (steps)

1. For every meeting request, ask for the agenda of the meeting and what is the desired outcome.
2. When they get back, assess if the agenda & desired outcome can be fulfilled without having the meeting ie. on text or email or sending 1 or 2 screen recordings back and forth.
3. If the agenda can be fulfilled without a meeting, politely ask to do it over email/text. Here’s how you can phrase it, “hey let’s do it over email only as I’m a little caught up. Can you send me A, B & C, and I’ll get back to you on that in a couple of hours time”.
4. If it’s something that would be better done over a meeting, like discussing the roadmap ahead, then schedule a meeting by all means.

This approach will help you reduce the number of meetings you attend in a day, and you’ll have ample time to do focused work.

TLDR;

For every meeting request, ask for the agenda & desired outcome. If it’s something that can be accomplished without a meeting, avoid scheduling the meeting and do it over email/text.

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