How to replace half your meetings
Readtime: 3.5 minutes
Nearly two in three people say they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job.
And time spent in Teams meetings has tripled over the last few years.
(Both are findings from a Microsoft study.*)
And they are not unrelated.
Too many people are now spending most of the normal working day in meetings talking about work, and doing the actual work in the evenings and weekends.
I was one of them for years.
Meetings all day. Inbox in the gaps. Then the work that actually needed my brain happening after dinner, or on a Sunday morning before anyone else was awake.
And looking back, a huge proportion of those meetings that took over my days didn't need to be meetings in the first place.
There are three types of meeting that almost never need to be meetings:
Status Update Meetings
The first type is the status update.
"Quick catch-up." "Where are we at?" "Any blockers?"
These are meetings where one person tells the others what's happening, and the others mostly listen.
A dashboard does this better. A single place that shows what's being worked on, what's done, what's blocked, and what's next. No meeting is required, because everyone can check it when they need to.
Information Transfer Meetings
The second type is the information transfer meeting.
"Let me walk you through this." "Quick presentation." "Update call."
Someone has prepared something and wants to take everyone through it. Which, again, is one person talking and the others listening.
A 5-minute recorded video does this better. People can watch it when they're fresh, at 1.5x speed, and rewatch the bits they didn't catch.
Decision Meetings
The third type is the big decision meeting.
"Big decision to make." Let's have a call to get everyone’s thoughts."
These are the ones that often feel the most necessary, because there's something important at stake. But they're often the ones that produce the worst thinking.
A live document does this better. A clear owner. A deadline. The options laid out with pros and cons. A recommendation. And then written input from the people who matter. Because writing forces you to actually work out what you think, which talking very often doesn't.
What meetings are actually good for
Once you've stripped those three categories out, you're left with the meetings that genuinely should be meetings:
Nuanced conversations.
Relationship building.
High-stakes decisions where the discussion itself adds value.
Complex problems that need real-time back and forth.
That's roughly it.
If a meeting isn't doing one of those four things, it probably shouldn't be a meeting.
A reasonable rule of thumb: if it can be written or recorded, it shouldn't be a meeting. Which is uncomfortable, because almost everything passes that test.
Where to start
You're not going to fix this across your whole company tomorrow. You're probably not going to fix it across your whole team either. The meetings culture you've inherited has a lot of momentum behind it, and most of it isn't yours to redesign.
But you can probably pick one or two meetings next week that you do control. Or that you have enough influence over to change.
Look at each one and ask which category it's in.
Status update? Replace it with a dashboard.
Information transfer? Send a short video instead.
Decision? Create a document, give people 48 hours to comment, and announce the decision at the deadline.
See what happens. My guess is that most people will be happily relieved.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. I posted a detailed infographic version of this on LinkedIn yesterday. The post is here if you want to see what people are saying about it. And if you want the high-resolution PDF to use as a guide, it’s here.
* - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work