Back-to-back meetings are human made

I’m really looking forward to a day of back-to-back meetings where my eyes never leave the screen and my derriere never leaves the seat.

Said no one ever.

And yet, we have an increasing number of days in our week that are just that.  Breakless, airless days where one meeting ends on the hour and so the next one starts.  And on it goes until we collapse in a heap, hardly daring to look at the list of actions those meetings have yielded.  It’s miserable.

Some of the by-products of conjoined meetings are:

• We have to exit before they end in a bid to get to the next one
• We’re late for at least one meeting a day, irritating others who were on time
• We don’t have time to download our thoughts and reflections from one meeting before going in to the next, so we arrive at the meeting with our head not clear from the last one
• Actions pile up with no time to start working on them
• Unless our note-taking is on point every time, we can’t fully remember what went on or what we agreed to at each meeting
• Those little human necessities like going to the loo, grabbing a coffee or just plain staring out the window, become luxuries.

We expound the virtues of flexible working and not having to be in the office all the time – but really, if we work like this, it doesn’t feel flexible at all.  We just have a different view from our window.

Enough doom and gloom – here is the good news.  The back-to-back meetings epidemic is human made.  We created and normalized it, so we too have it in us to recreate a better pattern.  Here are what some of our clients have successfully done without reducing productivity or effectiveness:

• Applied the 15-minute rule. We pioneered this back in 2020 and you can read about here. Essentially you are ensuring a 15 (or 20, even better - 30) gap between meetings.  You have to do this across teams or it doesn’t work but it makes a massive difference to be people’s energy and wellbeing, as well as meetings feeling less arduous.
• Found alternatives to screen meetings like going for a “walk and talk” using phones - a great option when you don’t need to look at papers or slides.
• Implemented meeting-free afternoons each week/month.
• Saved longer meetings for when everyone can be together in a shared space and ensured these include some social time.
• Carried out a meeting audit to assess which meetings are necessary and add value and which are a fixture in the diary no longer needed. Dropping even one regular meeting because it no longer serves a purpose can make a huge difference to time and workload.

We’ve helped numerous teams implement these great ideas and we can help you and your team too.

And finally, there is one action we can all take in a bid to end the drudge of days of non-stop meetings. That is to stop judging people’s value by how “busy” they are, aka how many meetings they have in their diaries. Instead, if we start putting a value on thinking and planning time before and after meetings and just time with no meetings at all, to work, apply and take action, we’ll start to break the cycle.  And become happier humans again.