Some of my favorite people spend most of their workdays in meetings.

Meeting after meeting after meeting. 

End to end for eternity, with some overlapping meetings thrown into the mix for good measure.

Perhaps you can relate.

So, when I came across a sign recently that said, “THIS MEETING COULD HAVE BEEN A FISTFIGHT,” I said a quick prayer for these folks.

Stay strong.

My life couldn’t be more different. 

For example, my assistant and I concluded our bi-weekly meeting yesterday questioning if moving to monthly meetings would be sufficient. 

We started with weekly meetings, but discovered that much of what we discussed in those meetings could have been handled over email, text, or the occasional phone call, if we hadn’t been holding those agenda items back for our meetings.

The scheduled meetings literally slowed us down.

So, instead of meeting, we’ve been trading many more emails and making much more progress together.

You can’t save your people from every meeting, but you have to do your best to insulate them from as many non-essential or counterproductive meetings as possible.

I’m not arguing that ALL meetings are bad.

I’m simply offering that many meetings, perhaps most meetings, are stealing your people’s time, energy, and focus without providing the value they promise.

Your people have a finite amount of time, energy, and focus. Don’t sleep on the opportunity cost of spending those precious resources in ineffective meetings.

Perhaps this meeting shouldn’t have been a fistfight, but an email or a phone call might have worked like a charm.

Leaders help their people think critically about the value and cost of the meetings in which they participate and the meetings to which they invite others.

OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION:
1: Check in with your people about the value and cost of the meetings they regularly attend and identify opportunities to extract them from the ones that are a waste of time.
2: Grab a copy of Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli. It only takes about 30 minutes to complete and you will probably want to share it with everyone in your organization.