Goodbye Meeting Overload, Hello Deep Work (& Loving Life)

You picked this career because you could make a difference. You picked this career because its main thing really fires your brain. No wonder confetti attention, created by a calendar that looks like camouflage when you step back and squint, makes each week feel like a draining slog. It is.

From Meeting Hamster to Deep Work

Shifting from meeting hamster to deep work is not about maximizing efficiency, or anything else that treats you like a human bot. It’s about you and your one life. It’s about our shared world that needs your insight and innovation. You sure can’t do your best work when half of each two-hour block is populated with at least one meeting that feels redundant and everyone is betting will go overtime.

You Can Address Company Meeting Culture

If you’re a leader, don’t play the “I can’t do anything about it” game. You can.

A group of top leaders at a client insisted to me they have no control over their calendars. In a later conversation with one of these directors, the person expressed frustration that team members regularly sent meeting requests for the lunch hour. Requests that they accepted.

You are not a victim, of your calendar or of your company’s meeting culture.

This director had full authority to decline lunch-time meeting invites and a perfect opportunity to communicate broadly with the team, reaffirming a mid-day break as a healthy priority for everyone. This company's meeting overload dial pointed to the red zone, with many leaders seemingly convinced they couldn't do anything about it.

Core4-trained leaders know that meeting invites go out only after careful consideration: “Does this need a meeting?”

Meetings must be forward-focused and led by a skilled facilitator to make the time and the immense talent coordination productive. Honoring the full team by communicating, in writing, the company’s thoughtful approach to meetings is a great way to begin changing meeting culture. Lay out clear expectations and guidelines.

Fewer meetings is better. Higher value from meetings deemed important enough to schedule is best.

Start a pilot and welcome peoples’ feedback after they’ve followed the new approach for a set period of time. You want real experiences and good faith results, not opinions.

What Needs a Meeting?

1. Emergencies not covered by existing protocols

2. Team review of a pop-up opportunity with a near-term deadline

3. Complex decision-making that benefits from synchronous discussion of a formal proposal

4. Well-managed creative brainstorming within a larger overall strategy

5. Mature handling of conflict: directly discussing the issue with the relevant person or involved group

6. Communication best delivered verbally, due to practicalities of the environment (a nursing shift change) or the sensitive emotional nature of the messaging, for example certain announcements, highly political consensus building, or shared grief

7. Regularly scheduled team or project meetings with clear, specific goals requiring real-time interaction for progress

8. Regularly scheduled 1+1s between team member and supervisor

What Should NOT be a Meeting?

Did you notice what doesn’t appear on the list of what needs a meeting?

• Status updates, most of which can arrive digitally with descriptive subject lines and reasonable review deadlines. Digital status updates precede meetings where stuff gets done.

• General check-ins

• Any meeting that doesn’t have a clearly stated goal

• Recurring meetings that mattered at one time and don't anymore

• A group meeting called as a way for a leader to avoid directly addressing conflict or performance management with an individual

The Goodbye Wave

Give the goodbye wave to meetings you’re better off without. Open up and protect calendar space for deep work that transforms.

See, you're loving life more already!

(Image credit: Matheus Bertelli, via Canva)