Meeting overload - it's time to address it!

Why it matters and what I would do to take control back!

When I ask my many of my clients and #whatwinnersdo attendees if they have a ‘high performance diary’ the look on people’s faces tells me the answer. People are overloaded with meeting after meeting after meeting. Even more scary/ crazy/ concerning is that many of these meetings have no agenda, lack a clear purpose and often there are no documented actions that result.

In some cases, the only action is to book another meeting!

The risk is clear. When people go back to back like, the brain and the body gets tired. You only get time to think about your actions towards the end of the day - your thinking is fuzzy, you can get a little mixed up between meetings, you rush your actions and your communications. Things can get missed, misunderstood and before you know it you have people going in different directions or taking misguided actions.

This is before you add in the relentless bombardment from emails and in-company chat systems!

Apart from the need to respond to all your action items, if this end of day period is your only time for thinking and doing ‘deep-work’ there is a clear risk to the quality and impact of what you do and any decisions you make.

To help regain some balance and some control as well as to provide time for high quality, high impact work, I have been thinking about 3 areas. Each of these require discipline, effective diary management and an ability to prioritise effectively. It depends upon the ability ro say no and stay true to the system:

• Time-block: once a day you to either do some thinking (Mozart time in my world) or some deep-work where you solely focus on a high value piece of work that requires some concentrated effort. Be disrpution free and uninterruptible!

• For the next 2 weeks, make every one hour meeting 30 minutes. However keep the hour in your diary: debrief, do your meeting actions that are quick, schedule and deep-work and then get set-up for whatever comes next in your diary. You might even get 5 minutes to freshen up and make a cup of tea!

• Spend some time revisiting what is high and what is low value. Make sure you put the high value activities in your diary first and ensure this time is not impacted by others. ie put meetings in after and not during this time! Equally schedule time to work on low value at the end of a day - perhaps in-box time comes then!

I am sure there are many great ideas out there on how to be more effective with our diaries to ensure we become ever more effective. This is my starter for 10, to get people questioning what and how they currently run their day and put forward some simple but powerful recommendations to get back in control (& balance) and use time to our advantage.

👉Have YOU got a high performance diary?

👉Has your team?

👉Have you got too many meetings that often run back to back?

👉When do you do the work? Take the actions? Do the thinking?

👉Do you time-block?

👉Could you shorten every meeting by 30 minutes?

👉Do you do HVA first or last and in a controlled or random way?

👉What can you add to these simple recommendations? L/C+10%