BuzbyTimeRead the requirements guide

Remote and hybrid · 6.4

Meetings, and the hours nobody counts

Meetings, and the hours nobody counts. What decides it, what it costs, and what usually goes wrong. For a practical comparison point, see Monitask's project time tracking tools.

The one thing time data measures wellAn exception

Most of this blog is about the limits of a time record. Meetings are the exception: they have a start, an end, a list of attendees and a duration, and multiplying by a cost rate produces a figure that is close to true.

Which makes meeting load the single most tractable subject in this whole field, and the one organisations examine least. Teams comparing the wider operating context can also consult Deloitte.

The arithmetic nobody runs

A weekly hour-long meeting with eight people is eight hours a week, four hundred a year, a fifth of a full-time role. At loaded cost rates it is a substantial annual expenditure that appears in no budget and requires no approval.

Run that calculation for your three largest recurring meetings. It takes ten minutes and it reframes a conversation that otherwise goes nowhere because nobody has attached a number to it.

Why remote made it worse

Scheduling a meeting became free. No room to book, no walk, no physical constraint on how many can happen in a day, and an invitation costs the sender nothing while costing every recipient an hour.

The result across most organisations has been more meetings, shorter gaps between them, and a working day fragmented into pieces too small for anything demanding.

The audit

Once a year, list every recurring meeting with its attendees, duration and annual cost. Then ask, for each: what decision does this produce, and what would happen if it stopped?

The usual outcome is that a third are cancelled, a third lose attendees, and a third turn out to be the most valuable hours in the week. All three answers are useful and none is available without the list.

Four changes that reliably help

  • Default durations of twenty-five and fifty minutes, so that there is a gap.
  • No agenda, no meeting, applied without exception for a month.
  • Attendance optional by default, with a written outcome for everybody else.
  • A recurring meeting expires after six months unless somebody renews it.

The fourth is the most effective and the least used. Recurring meetings never end on their own; they outlive their purpose, their creator and occasionally the project.

Recording meeting time

Give it a category. It is the only way the audit above is possible from data rather than from calendars, and calendars overstate: they include meetings that were declined, cancelled or attended for ten minutes.

The caution

Everything in the entry on measurement applies. A target for meeting hours produces meetings recorded as something else, and the organisation loses the one clean measurement it had.

Report it, discuss it, and attach no consequence to it.

Who should be in the room

The fewest people who can take the decision, plus anybody whose work changes because of it. Everybody else receives the written outcome.

Attendance as a signal of inclusion is the reason meeting lists grow, and it is addressed by better written communication rather than by more invitations.

The meeting that should be a document

Any meeting whose purpose is to convey information. If nobody will argue, disagree or decide, it is a broadcast, and a broadcast is more efficient written and better for the people in other time zones.

The objection is that nobody reads documents. Frequently true, and it is a separate problem that holding a meeting conceals rather than solves.

Standing meetings for connection

Some exist to maintain relationships rather than to decide anything, and they are legitimate. Say that is what they are, keep them short, and do not defend them on the grounds of productivity, which invites a comparison they will lose.

What to do this month

List your three largest recurring meetings, compute the annual cost of each, and ask the two questions. Ten minutes, and it is the highest-return calculation in this part of the blog.

The gap between meetings

Twenty-five minutes of work between two meetings is not twenty-five minutes of work. Anything demanding needs a longer run, and a calendar of hourly meetings with nothing between them produces a day in which nothing substantial was possible.

Protect blocks rather than counting hours: two uninterrupted half-days a week is a more useful target than a meeting-hours ceiling, and it is harder to game.

A short summary

Meetings are the one thing a time record measures cleanly. Calculate the annual cost of your three largest. Audit recurring meetings yearly and let them expire by default. Default to shorter durations with gaps. Make attendance optional with a written outcome. And attach no target to the number.

One line to carry

An invitation costs the sender nothing and every recipient an hour, which is the entire economics of the modern calendar.

Declining

Make it normal. A culture where declining an invitation is acceptable, with a line saying why and asking for the notes, removes more meeting hours than any policy about durations, and it requires somebody senior to do it first and visibly.

Where to start

Give meetings a category in the record this month. Everything else in this entry depends on being able to see the number.

A last note

Of everything on this site, the meeting audit is the cheapest action with the largest likely return, and it requires no software beyond the ability to add up.

The meeting that should exist and does not

Occasionally the audit finds the opposite: a decision nobody owns because the forum for taking it was cancelled. Adding a meeting is a legitimate outcome of a meeting audit and it happens about once in every five.

Also in remote and hybrid