Hi Reader,

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Great meetings can change the world. The problem is that most meetings... just aren't that great.

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In How to Fix Meetings, Hayley Watts and I talk about the 40-20-40 model that we learned from my friend and professional meeting-facilitator, Martin Farrell. The idea is simple: spend 40% of your time and attention on the preparation, 20% on the meeting itself, and save 40% for the follow-through. Sounds sensible, right? Yet when we think about the implications, it means that if you're spending a Monday in back-to-back meetings, then you've already used up your 20% for the 'being in the meetings' part - and so you'd better spend the rest of the week following up from them.

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The reason so many meetings are sub-par is because there are so many meetings. Meetings should be time and space to think, yet thinking requires concentration, presence, and attention. A culture where everyone is 'busy' with meetings is already making concentration, presence and paying full attention to stuff pretty difficult, especially if everyone is thinking about their next meeting or the one they've just come from. It's no wonder that back-to-back meetings often feel like a treadmill without value.

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Part of the problem is a perceived lack of scarcity. In a moment where some project or problem we're working on feels stuck, it's the easiest thing in the world to fire off a meeting request to four or five people to give yourself the illusion of progress - but of course the cost of that illusion is five hours of other peoples' time, plus the opportunity cost of what they're not doing because they're stuck in a culture of back-to-back meetings.

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When we start a project, we of course ask "what's the budget for this?", but when we start a meeting, we rarely ask ourselves "what's the budget for this meeting?".

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I wonder if a solution to this might be that we all start to calculate our "meetings footprint". It's like your carbon footprint, but it's calculated based on the waste of everyone's time you create. The volume of measurement for our "meetings footprint" would be in employee hours, or perhaps even in the financial cost of each meeting we create.

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Perhaps there could be ways to 'offset' your footprint, too: your productive contributions at meetings organised by other people would be offset the costs of the meetings you organise (whereas meetings where you sit silently on Zoom with the camera off and contribute nothing don't offset anything - you're still contributing to the problem there).

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Certain meetings might be exempt. It would be unfair, for example, for the person who organises the whole-company offsite to be racking up a huge footprint just for taking on the admin job of organising something people find valuable. And perhaps two or three times a month, when someone takes the initative to organise a meeting that turns out to be so remarkably valuable that it brings about a big breakthrough, or unsticks the stickiest of sticky issues, then a special resolution could be passed at the end of that meeting to grant that person "meetings-footprint credits" - we need to encourage their brave innovation.

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So this week, I invite you to think about your own "meetings footprint" - and if you feel able, perhaps raise the footprint idea with one or two of the bigger culprits wherever you are. Cutting down the time everyone spends in meetings is the best way to ensure that when we do meet, everyone has the time, energy and attention to make it count.

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And if you want some help with fixing your meetings culture, then my company Think Productive runs workshops on this, and of course you can check out the book too.

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Have a great week,

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Graham

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