Judge whether a meeting is needed and who has to be there.
Open next week's calendar and add up the hours already set aside for meetings. Then go back through last week and count the meetings that taught you something you couldn't have picked up from five minutes of reading. A lot of people find the second number lower than they would like.
Most poor meetings begin with reasonable intentions. A person has a question, a calendar invite is the quickest way to get everyone together, and they book a half-hour without thinking about it. Just before the invite goes out is when changing a meeting costs the least, and often the right change is to skip it.
Meetings earn their place when the people in them have to talk with one another, rather than just receive information. That happens in three situations: discussion, a decision several people share, and building a relationship.
Discussion is for a problem nobody has solved yet, where the answer comes out of people adding to one another's ideas, testing them and arguing back. A shared decision looks like three teams settling on a launch date: each team knows its own limits, and the others don't. Lesson 2.4, "Know when to stop typing and talk", noted that chat threads about decisions like this tend to stall. Relationship meetings include kicking off work with a new client, meeting a new team for the first time, and talking things through after something has gone wrong. Sitting together in a room or on a video call does something in those moments that a message can't.
Everything outside those three is informing: updates, announcements, and plans people just need to note. Informing is usually better sent as a message. Most people read faster than anyone can talk, and they can read at a time that suits them, so writing the update down saves time for you and for them. If your plan is to speak for 25 minutes while everyone else listens, put it in an email and offer a short call for anyone with questions.
To find the real cost of a meeting, multiply how long it runs by how many people attend. The calendar hides this, because each attendee sees only their own hour. The hours are spent all the same, and they come out of the work the meeting exists to help. Eight people in a one-hour meeting use 8 working hours, roughly a whole day for one person. Ten people in a 30-minute weekly update use 5 hours each week, or about 250 hours across a year (both illustrative calculations).
Once you do the sum, your decisions tend to change. Nadia leads a team at a logistics firm in Jurong (an invented example). Every Monday she held a status meeting for twelve people, where each spoke for around three minutes and most listened to updates that didn't concern them. She worked it out: twelve people, one hour, every week. She swapped the meeting for a shared document that everyone completes by Monday 10am, and kept a 20-minute Wednesday call for the four or five people who have blockers to sort out. Your own team's numbers work out the same way.
When a meeting does go ahead, three groups need to be there:
The people who make the decision. If they're missing, the most the meeting can produce is a recommendation. The people who will do the work, because they know what can really be done and how soon. The people holding information the discussion depends on, for example finance when the question is about budget, or the client lead when it's about a client.
Everybody else receives the notes. That covers people who are curious, senior colleagues who might feel left out, and anyone invited out of habit. If the notes go out the same day, nobody misses what was decided; lesson 6.4, "Close with actions, owners and dates", explains how to do this.
Plenty of people stay on invites they don't need because leaving feels impolite. Make dropping off easy: mark the optional attendees in the invite and promise them notes. A line like "Optional for design: we'll send notes" lets someone step out without seeming rude.
Smaller groups get more done. In a meeting of four, everyone speaks. In a meeting of twelve, most people sit and listen, a few do most of the talking, and reaching a decision takes longer.
Calendar apps offer 30 or 60 minute slots by default, and a meeting tends to expand to fill whatever time it's given. Meetings are also stacked back to back, so people turn up late from the previous one and slip out early for the next. Make 25 or 50 minutes your default instead. Both Google Calendar and Outlook have a setting that finishes meetings a few minutes early, leaving time to grab a drink, walk to another room or change video calls and still be on time for the next one. When a 25-minute meeting keeps getting through its agenda with ten minutes left over, shorten it to 15.
Before you book or accept a meeting you own, ask four questions. Does it need discussion, a group decision or a relationship, or is it really informing? Who must be there, and who could read the notes? How short could it be? Could it be one meeting a fortnight instead of every week? Begin with the recurring meetings on your calendar, because they cost the most and get questioned the least.
Go through the meetings you own next week and mark each one: could it be a message, could it be shorter, could it have fewer people?
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).