Meetings Quietly Eat Your Workday If You Let Them

This is a worry common to everyone who works. I get asked this kind of question, or consulted about it, because I hate meetings. (I say this openly.)

First of all, meetings generally cost a lot. When I was at a certain company Y, since it was a large company I roughly knew the salary table, so I once tried calculating the hourly cost of a certain meeting. At the time there weren’t many voices calling for shortening meeting time, and a 2-hour regular meeting was held with the entire team, about 30 people.

I compared that cost with the laptop I was agonizing over whether to expense—adding memory would raise the price, and I was worrying about whether someone would question that price, but then again, thinking about it that way felt ridiculous. And it wasn’t just regular meetings. Endless development meetings, or being told “everyone participate for now” and reluctantly attending something where most people end up dozing off—all of it left me feeling that the cost awareness of people who organize such meetings is far too lax.

Stanford’s experiment on concentration

Research on concentration has been conducted in various places. I once saw the results of a Stanford experiment and nodded along thinking “yeah, yeah, I get it.” The experiment had programmers wearing brainwave-measuring devices while programming, and at the moment their concentration peaked, someone would call and say “look out the window and tell me what the weather is like right now.” The programmer would then go back to work, but the experiment found it took more than 15 minutes for concentration to return to its original level. Engineers sometimes reach a moment when they can fully draw out a design in their head. To put it grandly, this might be a state of being “in the zone.” Turning that into something concrete requires bringing concentration to its peak.

But it’s not just interruptions like phone calls. Even just having a “meeting scheduled” means keeping an eye on the time. Inevitably, the frequency of entering the zone drops, and even when you do enter it, interruptions occur. It’s fine to state flatly that people with many meetings on their calendar are less productive. Incidentally, Marc Andreessen, the developer of Netscape and founder of one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, is said to only check email and take calls during one specific time of day.

Thinking about how to avoid this

By now everyone probably understands, at least intuitively, the downsides of having too many meetings. The question is how to avoid it. Below I’ll write my own approach. This isn’t some kind of hack-like technique, so sharing it shouldn’t cause any harm—I imagine my well-known hatred of meetings has already gotten across to everyone, and meetings won’t needlessly increase as a result.

The first approach—very simple and extremely clear—is to flatly decline. If, in response to a request made “just in case, to be safe,” you think “there’s no point in attending,” say exactly that. The other person might feel you’re being uncooperative, but once the meeting has actually finished without issue, there’s usually not much lingering resentment afterward. There’s no need to put on a good face and become the “easy person to work with.” Doing so won’t raise your evaluation, and it won’t produce results.

People often ask, “please tell me your open schedule and times,” when coordinating a meeting. Rather than simply answering with times that are completely free, set your own rules, such as “don’t schedule meetings during this time slot” or “don’t schedule meetings unless there’s at least an hour of buffer before and after.” The exhaustion of having an entire day eaten up by meetings is no joke.

When you’re busy, when there’s real necessity, it can’t be helped. But even so, if you don’t secure time to properly organize feedback, look into things you didn’t understand, or engage in other productive activities, there’s no growth at all. At workplaces that use a calendar app, my calendar has blocks here and there marked “not available.” Sometimes these are private appointments, but in any case they convey a very simple message: don’t put a meeting here.

Chat tools save an enormous amount of time. Unlike email, there’s no need for preamble, the thread structure makes it easy to trace the background of a discussion, and “semi-real-time” responses are possible. By semi-real-time I mean it’s not actually real-time, but you can respond as if it were. This is a very major point.

By using small pockets of time whenever it’s convenient for you, you can handle many of the functions a meeting is supposed to serve: improving information transfer, advancing discussion, organizing shared items. Handle this thoroughly, and even when a meeting does happen, it can be kept short (if information sharing has been sufficient, you can start without preamble), and even when discussion is needed, it becomes easier to reach a conclusion, since the groundwork has already been laid.

If, even after doing all this, someone still keeps increasing the number of meetings, it might be worth trying the thing I mentioned at the beginning: telling them to calculate the cost.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/08/519/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.