Productivity
Meetings that weigh
An hour with five people is not an hour: it is five. How to do the sum, and how to halve it.
An hour-long meeting with five people burns five hours of work, and it happens every week. The sum is simple and almost nobody does it. Four rules are enough to keep only the meetings that genuinely earn their place.
Let's do a sum nobody does. Monday meeting: one hour, five people. That is five hours of work. Multiply by forty weeks and you get two hundred hours, which is a month and a half of one person full time. For a single meeting — the one held «because we have always held it».
An hour with five people is not an hour. It is five.
What yours costs
This is not an argument against meetings: it is an argument against the ones that decide nothing. A meeting that closes a choice is worth those five hours ten times over. One that «touches base» without deciding is not.
Four rules, and that is the lot
- If there is no decision to make, it is an email. An update gets read, not listened to by five people at once.
- Anyone who is not deciding does not need to be there. Send them the outcome: you save their hour and they will thank you for it.
- One question written in the invitation. «We decide whether the catalogue goes out in October or January». Without the question, the meeting expands on its own.
- You finish with who does what by when. Three lines at the end. Without them the meeting gets held again, and that is another five hours.
The next-month test
Take the standing meetings you have and cancel one for a month. Do not move it: cancel it. If after four weeks nothing has gone wrong, you have just recovered two hundred hours a year. If something did seize up, you have found out and you put it back — but this time you know what it is for.
It is the most unpleasant test I know, and the most useful!
Meetings with suppliers
Same rule, with one addition: ask whoever called it to send the decision to be made in advance. An hour-long meeting to «get to know each other better», with no question on the table, is an hour of selling dressed up as courtesy. People who work well send you the agenda without being asked. It is the same signal as the questions to ask before you sign. Our agenda is in services.
- A meeting costs everyone's hours, not one hour.
- With no decision to make, it is an email.
- You close with who does what by when, or you will hold it again.
Frequently asked questions
How do you tell whether a meeting is necessary?
If you can write the decision to be made in one line, it is necessary. If all you can write is the topic, it is an update: send it in writing and everyone reads it when they can.
What does a meeting really cost?
The hours of everyone in the room, not one hour. An hour with five people burns five hours of work; repeat it weekly and that is roughly two hundred hours a year, a month and a half of one person full time.
How do you cut meetings without losing control?
Write the question in the invitation, invite only the people deciding, and close with who does what by when. Then try cancelling one for a month: if nothing happens, it was not needed.