In my last post, I touched on but one aspect of my approach to meetings in the workplace. These are all good points and you should use them, especially muting other people who have yet to master their computer after three years of virtual meetings. But I found myself, the day after that post went live, talking about the invasive quality of so many meetings these days with a couple of coworkers who have decades of experience on me. We were all in agreement that there are too many meetings and so many of them are just so bad and no one seems to have any meeting etiquette. They asked me how I managed them, and I laid out my extremely firm boundaries on meetings these days, which I do my absolute best to stick to. A meeting invite is not a mandatory summons.
You do not have to go if you don’t want to.
Of course, that’s not wholly true: you’re going to have to go to some meetings, including worthless ones. But you can make it easier on yourself! You can take back your day! And life!
(Unless your job has somehow morphed to be almost exclusively meetings, in which case I would a) ask myself what exactly I’m bringing to the workplace if all of my time is tied up in meetings; b) count how many hours of overtime I’m working [if applicable. If you’re like me you also don’t work overtime]; and c) seriously consider getting a new job; and/or d) leveraging your power to fix this nonsense culture. In my extremely non-evidence based view, most people who spend their whole lives in meetings are senior leaders, so you have some leverage to stop the madness.)
Where did I get my aggressive anti-meeting stance? A leader, of course. I had a director who had the most awful meeting etiquette you’ve ever dealt with in your life. They went over the scheduled meeting time every single time, without checking in with participants if that was okay. They never once looked at a calendar when booking a meeting with us even though we have that capability. They never provided an agenda. Or a topic. They loved to slap “mandatory” on these agendaless, topicless meetings. They did not often truly consider who needed to be at a meeting, and would indiscriminately invite people. They loved to schedule two hour meetings for the next day, and would not include a break in their agenda which lived in their head.
Essentially, if there was a way to make meetings more miserable, they did it. They were also not very good at running a meeting - the conversation often ran away, and they were not great at keeping people on topic.
I will, however, begrudgingly admit that they taught me a lot with regard to meetings: namely, what not to do, what my boundaries are, and how to enforce those boundaries.
Most of my meeting rules assume the bulk of them are happening online. I’ve been having the vast majority of my meetings online since 2015, and I haven’t had an in-person meeting (which wasn’t a one on one session or class) since 2020. These may not work for you in their exact form. But the principles stand. No one will help you build these boundaries, even though they should be helping you build a culture with better care for one another, which includes not destroying everyone’s will to live in bad meetings.
My response to meeting invites involves asking myself the following questions:
Do I already have something in that time slot? If I do, then forget it, I’m out. I hate being double-booked and I’m not doing it. First come, first serve. With the caveat that all meetings are subordinate to the needs of the library users in my library. This is a specific me thing, though, and I explain it at the start of a new meeting with new people.
Related to the above, if I am busy: is this meeting going to rely on me in any way to move it forward, in which case, why did they not check my availability? If you’re not even glancing at my calendar or using the scheduling assistant or if you’re not part of my organization, asking me for open times, then on some level, you don’t respect me and my time.
If I am busy, and it’s simply a large informational meeting that doesn’t require my presence to have the meeting run, then it’s a casual decline or skip (if it’s being recorded, I do have to accept it, but I can proceed to ignore it).
Is the meeting at a time which is inconvenient for me? Is it too early? Bye. I don’t accept meetings before 10, preferably, and 9 is the earliest I’m willing to go, for people I like. I have the first hour of my day completely blocked in my calendar, so I once again return to the previous question: why does this person not respect my time? I also don’t accept meetings between 12 and 1, because I intend to eat lunch sometime in there (this is also blocked in my calendar). I don’t accept meetings after 3:30 if I don’t feel like it either. I need to wrap up my day, and you’re getting in the way.
Are you giving me enough time to prep? I no longer accept same day meeting requests except in the cases of my very close team, who I have a strong relationship with, or people asking me library-related questions. If you need me to prepare something and are only giving me the morning? Nope. Decline. I have work to do, which often cannot be moved around to read your very boring document.
Is your proposed meeting time longer than an hour, with no explanation? There is no reason to make anyone sit on Teams with you for more than 60 minutes. I will not be attending the full time, and/or I will be making my own bio break. I schedule breaks into my longer classes, you can slot a short break in your meeting agenda.
Is there a clear topic for this meeting? Is there an agenda? A friend and mentor of mine has always said, “no agenda? No attendance.” I’m a little fuzzier on this, because there are a few people I will accept meetings from without an agenda because they can be trusted. Or standing meetings, with agendas and topics which do not change. But I have started applying this more firmly in general, incorporating it in my response, regardless of my plans to attend. I ask for an agenda or at minimum, a topic. If you can’t give me that after I specifically ask, then I cannot come.
When I accept a meeting, the time you get is the time you booked. It doesn’t really matter if I have something urgent to do at 2PM or not; if the invite ends at 2PM, I am also leaving. If you ask me if I can stay, I probably will! But if you just keep going over time, yeah I have to go. Even if my tasks after the meeting are eating a snack and opening the mail. Even if I plan to stare at the wall blankly for an hour! You booked your time, you don’t get to try to extract more from me.
As a librarian, I’m used to being extremely accommodating, and as a youngish person with a decided baby face, I’m used to people thinking they can just steamroll me. (These people have not actually spent time talking to me, of course.) If you’re reaching out to me for teaching or consultation, awesome. I’m going to be much more lenient about these rules with you, and work with you to meet your timelines as best I can. But hey, you’re not the only person I serve, so you have to wait your turn, you know? And part of me being able to do my job properly means I need to set some serious boundaries about my time, at least that time which is under my control.
No one else is going to respectfully manage my time for me (because I don’t get to have an admin assistant). So I do it, and I do it firmly. A meeting invite is not a subpoena.
I can relate to a lot of this. ESPECIALLY the "no agenda, no attendance". I don't know how many meeting invites I've declined that simply had the subject "Question" with no further description.
That being said, I think the expectation/definition of a "meeting" might at least partly depend on the industry. As an example, in the software development world it's often much more productive to get the right people in an ad-hoc meeting than it is to have a long email thread. This often makes up at least 50% of my day, and planning/writing formal agendas etc. would be counter-productive. The advantage of online meetings is that we can record them -- this benefits those who couldn't attend, and serves as a record for later reference if needed.
Muting others -- I did this just yesterday. One attendee was doing that scraping-the-yogurt-container-with-the-spoon thing and I had to put an end to it.
I have many more thoughts on meetings. I'm going to take a walk and calm down. :-)
Love this. I still remember the first time I walked out of a work meeting. I was in my early 20s and worried that I would get in trouble, but the meeting had trudged past the one-hour mark with no sign of ending and I had a deadline to meet. When there were no consequences for my walkout, I established a 59-minute rule: At 59 minutes, I left. Since then I have attended a gazillion more meetings and run quite a few. A meeting with a timed agenda and clear action items is truly a wondrous thing.