March 24, 2026 • 27 mins
Nat and Kristen count their meetings live on air (nine for Kristen. NINE.) and dive into why your calendar has become a problem. They cover why time wasted in unproductive meetings has doubled since the pandemic, why 70% of senior execs admit meetings are inefficient but keep booking them anyway, and what you can actually do about it - from auditing your recurring ‘ghost meetings’ that nobody needs anymore, to the magic of the 15-minute meeting, to sending your manager three bullet points on a Monday instead of booking yet another catch-up.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:05):
Welcome to Power Up, the podcastthat uncovers the unique
challenges women leaders face today.
Join your hosts, Nat and Kristenas we dive into the tough topics
and provide actionable insights you can apply right now.
Don't forget to hit subscribe soyou don't miss.
Any episodes? We have been in rooms all over
(00:41):
the place in the last couple weeks and we've been chatting
about calendar crunch and meeting overload.
And another chat has been going off.
And I know we've touched on it, referenced it in the last few
podcast episodes, but we are going to deep dive into meetings
because I don't know, it just feels like it's a thing that is
(01:01):
killing us slowly. The net.
Let's assume that all of our individual Zoom chats and in
meetings and sessions are meetings.
Like I know they're not considered your typical meeting
with a bunch of people and team members and stuff, but like
they're still meetings. How many meetings do you have in
(01:22):
your calendar today? I'm going to go count mine.
You count yours. OK, this one.
Yeah, this, that's what I meant.Like this isn't included.
OK, so let's. Count.
That's it. That's it.
OK, wait, bear with this. Was your your only meeting today
everyone? That's great, that's fabulous.
(01:44):
OK, I'm going to count mine withpeople with other people other
than myself. Well, one was a no show was a
ghost. So I sat in that meeting all by
myself. So there was that.
So let's not include that one, and let's include the ones where
people showed up 1. I mean, let's count the one that
wastes your time as well, because I feel like, yeah.
(02:09):
Are we counting also the workshops we run?
Because there's. Yeah.
Let's just count our sessions. Count every session.
Well then I've got three. I've got recording the podcast,
running an International Women'sDay event on giving and gaining
energy. And then tonight I'm running
facilitating power match. I'll peer coaching for power
suiters. So that's.
(02:30):
A total of I've got 9 you. Have 9 today.
What were you Who? Were you on session today?
And what would you classify those meetings as?
A session, that's what I'm struggling to articulate my
brain. I've got a cold everyone.
I am like worse for wear today. But what I'm trying to
(02:53):
articulate is what I would ask what I I do as soon as I dialed
in, I was like, look at those freckles anyway, sun kisses.
But the I am classifying a meeting for the purposes of this
conversation as a session with another individual or multiple.
So like you are expending energyby being on, by chatting with
(03:15):
someone, by delivering, by collaborating.
So I've got nine of those today.Including this, the reason I
asked about and, and we've probably had some unofficial
meetings because we've probably talked to each other a couple of
times today. I feel like it's, and this is
something I've sort of nodded torecently as well.
And I'm curious to know how we categorize on top of, yes, of
course it's with other people, but like, are they sales
(03:37):
meetings? Are they decision making
meetings? Are they brainstorming sessions?
Like what are you, who are you talking to?
What kind of things are you getting out of those meetings?
Plenty. I mean I think a lot are in prep
for event delivery. A couple were sales, one was
welcome call for new power suitors.
(03:58):
So there's a huge range of of meetings.
Yeah, and that's what I think. And maybe it would be
interesting for us in general and power suitors to challenge
ourselves rather than, oh, I've got another meeting to I've got
a discussion or a decision that needs to be made with a group of
people, or I need to talk to someone to plan this thing.
Or we need to give an update to a group of people and really
(04:21):
focus on the point of the meeting rather than just lumping
everything under meetings. Because I think what we're going
to talk about today is when meetings just become meetings
become meetings, it can hide a lot of sins.
Whereas if we actually surface the outcome we want out of the
meeting or the point of the meeting, I suspect it's going to
be a lot easier to identify the ones that really value and that
(04:43):
you really need to be there, focus on collaborate with others
and the things that maybe like it's a default to having a
meeting where maybe there could be another solution that works
better. Yes, I love that.
OK, so before jumping to that, because that is a hot tip and I
am I am loving that. Let's talk about because I what?
(05:05):
OK Natalie, let's talk. I was really curious about
meetings because the amount of fatter as we've been out and
about my Canadian about in the last couple weeks has really
surprised, not surprised me. I'm like, wow, this is a thing.
They've gotten worse. What is going on?
(05:25):
Turns out, yes, meetings have gotten worse since the pandemic.
Time spent in meetings has crippled purple triple, triple.
That is unbelievable. Let's add on to that time wasted
in unproductive meetings. So this would be to your point
that people could not identify why they were there, didn't have
a productive outcome. There was no clarity in it has
(05:47):
doubled since 2019 and most people are saying they're
spending five hours a week in unproductive meetings.
So that has doubled since pre pandemic times. 70% of senior
execs, which is ironic because they sit in positions of power
and influences power of influence.
They hopefully can influence these things.
(06:08):
They say meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
But the reason I kept that static because I was like 70%
like not only are all the peopleattending all the meetings or
being invited to all the meetings finding them painful,
but it is the senior execs that are saying that as well.
It's interesting digging beneaththose those stats.
(06:28):
I wonder if there's a couple of reasons behind it.
So like pre pandemic, more people, well, basically everyone
we're sitting in offices together.
And so I suspect there may be interesting to know if there was
higher informal meetings, interruptions or catch ups.
And then when we all went remoteand everyone had to figure out
how to work, we started having more structured sessions.
Has that now stayed? Is that actually a good thing
(06:50):
because it's reducing interruptions and informal sort
of you know, and also I think the 70% of senior execs, I would
understand that too because we've mentioned it a bit as
well. But when you are sitting at the
top and trying to move work forward and underneath you
there's a whole bunch of recurring meetings.
And just like people throwing things in each other's
(07:12):
calendars, you don't really control that.
And what you can control them. What we've seen executives do is
say no meetings on Monday, or let's scrap every recurring
meeting in the business and use that kind of high level
influence to get people to shortcircuit their habits and look at
how they rebuild meetings. Because we've seen this as well.
(07:33):
Unless you actually look at someone's calendar, and gosh,
what we wouldn't give to be ableto do calendar audits with
people who tell us they're overloaded, unless you actually
sit down and look through them, it's really hard to know what's
actually in someone else's calendar, how they participate,
what they prep for, whether they're paying attention, like
you actually don't know. So it's kind of really hard to
do on math. You know what?
(07:54):
That's fair. Premium power suit coming your
way. I love that suggestion.
And I might add that of my 9 meetings, one to two of them
were 15 minute meetings and productive.
Like really productive in 15 minutes.
One of them was a 30 minute meeting that we concluded in 20
minutes. The other was a 30 minute
meeting that we concluded in about 18 minutes.
(08:15):
So I think that's worth pointingout that when I say 9, some of
them were like, you know, short,sharp and we, you know, got some
good stuff done because we are getting really good at that
because we have to I just. I feel like we have a slight
caveat in that we're doing a lotof business development.
And I think if you talk to any people in business development,
their calendar is quite rightly stacked with talking to
(08:37):
strangers. And secondly, we work with a lot
of people we're not used to working with.
So when we're planning these events, they'll be in
organizations with people who are working out their side of
things. And that often is the case when
you are new to working with eachother.
But between you and I, as we know how each other works more
we divide and separate work. We need far fewer meetings to
(08:58):
get the same level of collaboration because we know
how each other works. So I think we are somewhat of an
exception. And I think in some roles, lots
of consultants, client facing roles, meetings, a lot about
forming relationships, forming away of working.
And it's just when they sort of become on autopilot and you're
(09:19):
doing the same meetings with thesame group of people that there
are real opportunities to challenge whether or not that
same amount of time investment is needed and or the most
effective way to collaborate andshare ideas and knowledge and
solutions and decisions and whatever else it might be.
Yeah. And we are going to get to that
as well. I just want to share a few
(09:39):
insights that I heard on the road and in the mini master
class we did in the session a couple weeks ago on Calendar
Killers. And these feel like a few
themes. So the first theme is that we
asked a lot of people and we usually do in in a few different
types of sessions we hold. Now, when's your magic hour?
When are you at peak clarity? When are you doing your best
work? Turns out that people, when you
(10:01):
ask a room of people, do you have meetings throughout the
entire week? In your magic hour, all the
hands on the room go up. So that's the first kind of aha
moment. We're hoping can I challenge
that as well though because I feel like when I'm in a meeting
I'm on like I actually need to be at peak focus.
Otherwise, why am I in the meeting?
Research has shown that mid energy is great for
(10:21):
collaboration and and sales meetings and actually it's the
deep focus alone work that should be doing your magic hour.
That is what actually a few studies have shown.
So there is a difference between.
And make meetings less effectivebecause people are sort of half
there. Because I'm thinking about some
of the like kind of workshoppy style meetings I've had where
(10:44):
it's like full on brain power needed.
This is, I suppose if it's like a team all hands where it's more
conveying information. 100% facethe 9% is.
How 100? Percent is that and how long
should they be? If if it's more, sit back, relax
and you know, kick the news while someone talks at you.
(11:05):
I think the less, I think the suggestion out of this is map
the type of energy to your map the type of meeting to your
energy level. And my feeling in the room is
they would have been low energy meetings that are still
critical. Yes, could have been shorter,
maybe doesn't need to be as recurring, you know, all that
stuff, hygiene stuff, but that happened to be where they could
have been doing deep focus work and solving complex problems as
(11:27):
it relates to their individual work.
So let's just generalize that. There felt as though multiple
time zones was interesting people that really did have to
collaborate and be on meetings at random hours.
That's a thing, increasingly a thing.
And then another thing that was interesting was that people got
(11:49):
to the end of their work day andthen had to do their work and
they were leading into overtime because of meetings.
Yeah. And, and I think this is, this
is one of those interesting, like collaboration is half the
job, surely, like there is got to be a lot of coming together
and sharing stuff. So, but what's interesting, and
we covered this in our last week's mini master class around
(12:12):
calendar killers that we sort ofsee a meeting as a discreet
thing. And we don't think about the
prep, we don't think about the context switching and we
definitely don't think about allthe actions and work that falls
out of some meetings. And so that leads us to sort of
fill our days with meetings and not account for all the other
stuff that needs to be done. I've also seen another set that
(12:32):
you've jotted down around managers and how long they spend
in meetings. And this is one of those really
fascinating other switches that I've started to see anecdotally
is managers are now not just leading teams, but they're often
also, as we are asked to do morewith less in the work as well.
And when you look at like a teamof let's say even 8, that's 81
(12:53):
on ones that should be happeningweekly or fortnightly to check
in with people plus team meetings plus.
And you see how that stacks up. And I just wonder if the idea of
everyone gets the same sort of like this hammer to the same
nail of if you're a team leader,does every single person want a
weekly one-on-one to some peopleon a monthly one?
(13:13):
Who, who are you more? Who are the people who sort of
need more emotional support going through a tough time,
whatever it might be? And who are the people who
actually might just want to do awalking meeting with you and
chicken once a month, whatever it might be, But also really
working on your how do you get updates?
I always talk about this becauseit was such a, a light bulb for
(13:35):
me, but also saw the tension at the time.
Our CTO at our last company asked his engineering leads to
send him just a daily diary, quick notes of what they covered
that day rather than having catch UPS regularly.
They hated it to start. They felt like it was sort of
micromanaging or overseeing, buta, they felt like by having to
have that accountability, they really did focus a lot more on
(13:58):
what the top priorities were. But secondly, it saved them a
ton of time having to catch up really regularly.
So very quickly they went from resisting to like really big
fans of that approach. So sort of embracing that
experimental mindset of like, let's try and set ourselves a
goal of reducing one hour a weekof meetings.
What could we try differently this week?
(14:19):
And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
But like, what could we test? Feels like a nice attitude given
this like calendar crunch. Feels like it's an epidemic now.
It is. And I appreciate that you shared
that tip because I'd like to share another tip and I think
we'll just roll back and forth with a few tips here for the
rest of our podcast. But what I do want to point out
(14:40):
with how you said the three things every morning and the
micromanaging thing when we did drinks with power suitors in
person, we're doing a bunch of that now as well.
One person was chatting about not getting time with her
manager and I suggested that at the start of every Monday,
rather than ask for work in progress meeting with her
(15:02):
manager, send the three things that are top of mind or top
priority that you have on this Monday.
Send those to your manager and be like, I'm working on these
three things. I, I need you to know this and I
need you to unblock this. So it's just short, sharp.
And I think we have talked aboutthis in a past episode.
And then someone across the table who was a people manager
LED about eight people said, Oh my goodness, if I got 8 emails
(15:25):
every Monday just like that, that would solve so many
problems for me and mental load.And I'm like, love it.
That was great. Backing off off of your
suggestion of experimenting withsomething.
(16:26):
Why are we spending time together?
Can you help me? And like just kind of throwing
more challenges at their manager, rightly or wrongly?
No, it's not even rightly or wrongly, it's probably more
career experience or stage that as you get more experience, you
start to feel more comfortable and and take more ownership over
your workload and and keeping other people updated.
(16:46):
When you're quite early on, I don't think you should be
expected to do this, but if you do, you'll be rocking and out
through your career. Another meeting tip I've got is
90% of all meetings in most people's calendars are
reoccurring and they're called ghost meetings now because
they've been recurring for so long that people just expect
them. They start to go and multitask
(17:07):
in them and they do something else they check out because it's
just yet another reoccurring meeting that is may not be
adding as much value as originally intended.
So my tip is to if you have a reoccurring meeting that you
own, why is it still serving itspurpose?
Is the length serving its purpose?
Who is in the room serving its purpose, be it online or in
(17:29):
person? And secondly, if you are an
invitee to a reoccurring meeting, have a conversation
with those exact same things if you are not the owner of that
meeting. That's my next tip.
Yeah. And also I think it was Rachel
Fitz, John was talking about oneon ones and really impactful one
on ones and he suggested what was that?
Every six months you hold quite a different style.
(17:50):
And I and I wonder with these reoccurring meetings or with
your team catch UPS, you just plan for every month to go, oh,
what are all the meetings we have on that are recurring,
let's do an audit and let's try and cut one or change one or
change the amount of time. So actively managing them rather
than sit and forget. I really like that.
What about the collaboration trap?
(18:11):
I think this is something that when you think about the
meetings you're in, and I suspect this is what you were
alluding to with the sort of midto low energy when you
participate. If you are a need to be across
but not active participant, you're probably only needing to
be low in G to attend a meeting.If you are facilitating the
meeting or really actively involved in collaboration, you
(18:32):
might need to be high energy. So what you could probably take
from this is the people who aren't super involved maybe
don't need to be there. And we've often said no one
wants to be an observer in a meeting, but there are all sorts
of tools and ways we can now disseminate information and
include people without inviting them to a meeting.
I got really obsessed with loom videos for a while.
(18:54):
There's other simple ways of doing it where you might go.
Here's what I'm working on. Click through showcase, here's
three questions. Black there in an e-mail if
anyone wants to chat about this further.
Let's book a meeting if you're all comfortable with it.
Let's not notes after the meetings.
We've all got robots now take those notes.
Let them send them out to everyone have again this is that
(19:17):
sort of like don't sit and forget have actual rules about
what needs to be true in order to say yes to a meeting and
check in with your team. Did we all say no to something?
Who went to a meeting that they felt like, let's highlight those
meetings we went to that we didn't feel like we added any
value to? And let's look at creating rules
to make sure that we have permission to say no.
(19:38):
So like all those things are really easy ways to still get
that valuable collaboration without just sort of throwing
people at it who may or may not be the right people at the time.
Yeah. My last tip is because you've
covered so many and it actually goes back to something you said
at the beginning was the why of the meeting.
And that's something I think we are particularly good at is
(20:03):
being really explicit why we're meeting.
There is obviously a tool calledan agenda should you wish,
particularly if it is a meeting that is, you know, 6 to 8
people. An agenda will keep you to time
to task. There's a really clear outcome
of the meeting or a decision of the meeting if it is a much
smaller meeting. Make sure that the person, the
(20:25):
other person that is coming in on the meeting with you is very
clear on why we are meeting. What is the expected outcome or
the decision or what does success look like for that
meeting so that the minute you leave, you've got your next
steps to carry on. So be clear on why you're
meeting. If you're in a meeting and you
do not understand the why, again, great conversation to
(20:46):
chat about with your manager, the owner of the meeting, to
start getting some meeting hygiene there.
Yeah. I feel like I've just started
reworking on an old diagram we've done about should it be a
meeting? And it's worth checking out our
newsletter in a couple of weeks because no, no, probably this
week time. What is time about what?
What defines whether or not it should be in a meeting?
(21:08):
Because I think even things likeis it urgent?
How long does this need even things like making a decision
quite often depending on your personality type and how you
think. Like I think by talking I can
think quickly on the spot. I assume everyone else can.
That's ridiculous. Other people like to go away and
read things and process it and then come up with a decision.
(21:29):
Is a meeting the right context to get the best brains making a
decision, or should you be sending that context beforehand
and just asking for the decisionasynchronously?
Same goes with urgency. We have a tendency to think
what's top of mind for us is topof mind for everyone else.
But often the stuff we're working on, especially if you
really master your calendar likeI think you and I do, we're
(21:51):
working three weeks out Max minimum from deadlines a lot of
the time. So lots of flexibility baked in
to go. We've got three weeks still
before we need to get this done,but we're plunking it in now.
So we've got way ability to think about it follow on time
for follow on actions if we needto.
It is such a stress reducer rather than sort of, yeah,
winding up with having to do everything once the deadline.
(22:15):
Yeah, that, that was I, I reckonthat's the final thing from my
side is just really be thoughtful as you go.
One, one thing that I heard of that flummoxed me a little bit
because I didn't experience thisper SE, was people that book
meetings upon meetings because Inever had a calendar that
(22:35):
allowed that and I didn't know how to respond in the moment.
I know there are some tools thatyou can use to automatically
decline when you are clearly booked, but I I just thought is
it a tool problem or is it like why are there meetings being
booked upon meetings? I think it's a combination of
(22:55):
things. I I've definitely been in that
position. I think if you're someone who
time blocks your whole calendar looks busy.
So when people really do want totalk to you, they're like, well,
I'm just going to have to book atime anytime that Secondly, if
you meeting with 75710 people, finding a time that everyone
works for everyone, probably notgoing to happen.
(23:17):
So my suspicion is the people who are the least needing to be
there get the meetings booked over, in which case it's a good
time to go. Do I need to attend?
So there's a couple of reasons why and I think the tools might
help with auto decline, but my suspicion is a lot of people
won't use them because if your manager books that meeting and
you order decline, that might lead to some tension.
(23:37):
So it, it may be more to your point meeting hygiene around.
OK, so now I've been double booked.
Firstly, I'm going to check thatit's double booked before
accepting it. And then secondly, prioritize
those two meetings. Which one's the most important
is one with just one other person?
Can I shrink it down to 15 minutes?
Can I remove it? And we do it asynchronously and
(23:57):
use each of those opportunities to really challenge yourself to
clear out your calendar rather. Yeah, just because I do feel
like the automatic decline is probably only effective for
certain situations. And it is really hard.
Everyone's operating under calendar crunch.
Gosh, wouldn't we love to live in a world where everyone did
think a lot before putting in yet another meeting?
(24:20):
But we can probably take their ownership a little bit on
ourselves. And like with everything power
suit, don't change the world. Like, don't clear out your
entire calendar. If you can free up 30 minutes
this week, amazing. And if next week you can free up
another 30, amazing. Even around the edges.
Not, you know, rather than the stuff that you have to go.
Sure, that feels too hard to change right now.
(24:41):
Yeah, and I and I wonder if meeting length is kind of my
ending note, then my new ending note.
And that is, Oh my gosh, when people used to book half an
hour, 60 minutes with me, I was like, why?
Like we're massive fans and we've said it a bunch of times,
but like 15 minute meeting people is gold.
You can get a lot done if you'vegot AY and agenda and it makes
sense. Obviously not necessarily a
(25:03):
meeting with eight people with abig decision, complex decision,
but certainly for a lot of meetings, I suspect some of them
can be shorter. So even if you just take note
this week after you listen to this podcast every time you're
in a meeting, should it have been that length?
Should it have been a meeting? Was there a clear why to the
meeting? A bunch of these things is, you
(25:24):
know, was there anyone missing, key decision makers missing, Why
are you even meeting, you know, so on and so forth.
So just take notice like you said, take notice and then make
one small change. Yeah, I mean, it does.
When you said that, I was like, I don't even know if we've
adapted meetings since we've started to have like
collaborative tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs
where you can actually just get out of dock and all be in there
(25:46):
making changes. Like we still act like those
things don't exist, where a lot of the time you actually can
suggest changes and work on a shared.
Even if you turn an agenda into a shared output, you can do a
lot of that in your own time. So yeah, it is.
It's funny how we just haven't really rethought a lot of these
things as technology has evolved.
And so we sort of using old tools where there's plenty
(26:09):
better ones now. Forward this podcast everyone.
To everyone, blame Power Suit onbringing up the conversation of
meetings in your organization byforwarding it along.
We would love to be the bearers of judgement and no, no
optimization. No, I mean I can only imagine
people will be praising us surely.
(26:31):
That's right, That's right. We would love who.
Likes meetings? Yeah, please forward this on
also. We would love that as well to
increase our listenership. We'd love that.
More power suitors, more joy. So check out powersuit.com.
Everyone, if you have a topic that you want us to cover, just
flip it to us at Hello app, powersuit.com and we'll catch
y'all next time. Bye.
Welcome to Power Up, the podcastthat uncovers the unique
challenges women leaders face today.
Join your hosts, Nat and Kristenas we dive into the tough topics
and provide actionable insights you can apply right now.
Don't forget to hit subscribe soyou don't miss.
Any episodes? We have been in rooms all over
(00:41):
the place in the last couple weeks and we've been chatting
about calendar crunch and meeting overload.
And another chat has been going off.
And I know we've touched on it, referenced it in the last few
podcast episodes, but we are going to deep dive into meetings
because I don't know, it just feels like it's a thing that is
(01:01):
killing us slowly. The net.
Let's assume that all of our individual Zoom chats and in
meetings and sessions are meetings.
Like I know they're not considered your typical meeting
with a bunch of people and team members and stuff, but like
they're still meetings. How many meetings do you have in
(01:22):
your calendar today? I'm going to go count mine.
You count yours. OK, this one.
Yeah, this, that's what I meant.Like this isn't included.
OK, so let's. Count.
That's it. That's it.
OK, wait, bear with this. Was your your only meeting today
everyone? That's great, that's fabulous.
(01:44):
OK, I'm going to count mine withpeople with other people other
than myself. Well, one was a no show was a
ghost. So I sat in that meeting all by
myself. So there was that.
So let's not include that one, and let's include the ones where
people showed up 1. I mean, let's count the one that
wastes your time as well, because I feel like, yeah.
(02:09):
Are we counting also the workshops we run?
Because there's. Yeah.
Let's just count our sessions. Count every session.
Well then I've got three. I've got recording the podcast,
running an International Women'sDay event on giving and gaining
energy. And then tonight I'm running
facilitating power match. I'll peer coaching for power
suiters. So that's.
(02:30):
A total of I've got 9 you. Have 9 today.
What were you Who? Were you on session today?
And what would you classify those meetings as?
A session, that's what I'm struggling to articulate my
brain. I've got a cold everyone.
I am like worse for wear today. But what I'm trying to
(02:53):
articulate is what I would ask what I I do as soon as I dialed
in, I was like, look at those freckles anyway, sun kisses.
But the I am classifying a meeting for the purposes of this
conversation as a session with another individual or multiple.
So like you are expending energyby being on, by chatting with
(03:15):
someone, by delivering, by collaborating.
So I've got nine of those today.Including this, the reason I
asked about and, and we've probably had some unofficial
meetings because we've probably talked to each other a couple of
times today. I feel like it's, and this is
something I've sort of nodded torecently as well.
And I'm curious to know how we categorize on top of, yes, of
course it's with other people, but like, are they sales
(03:37):
meetings? Are they decision making
meetings? Are they brainstorming sessions?
Like what are you, who are you talking to?
What kind of things are you getting out of those meetings?
Plenty. I mean I think a lot are in prep
for event delivery. A couple were sales, one was
welcome call for new power suitors.
(03:58):
So there's a huge range of of meetings.
Yeah, and that's what I think. And maybe it would be
interesting for us in general and power suitors to challenge
ourselves rather than, oh, I've got another meeting to I've got
a discussion or a decision that needs to be made with a group of
people, or I need to talk to someone to plan this thing.
Or we need to give an update to a group of people and really
(04:21):
focus on the point of the meeting rather than just lumping
everything under meetings. Because I think what we're going
to talk about today is when meetings just become meetings
become meetings, it can hide a lot of sins.
Whereas if we actually surface the outcome we want out of the
meeting or the point of the meeting, I suspect it's going to
be a lot easier to identify the ones that really value and that
(04:43):
you really need to be there, focus on collaborate with others
and the things that maybe like it's a default to having a
meeting where maybe there could be another solution that works
better. Yes, I love that.
OK, so before jumping to that, because that is a hot tip and I
am I am loving that. Let's talk about because I what?
(05:05):
OK Natalie, let's talk. I was really curious about
meetings because the amount of fatter as we've been out and
about my Canadian about in the last couple weeks has really
surprised, not surprised me. I'm like, wow, this is a thing.
They've gotten worse. What is going on?
(05:25):
Turns out, yes, meetings have gotten worse since the pandemic.
Time spent in meetings has crippled purple triple, triple.
That is unbelievable. Let's add on to that time wasted
in unproductive meetings. So this would be to your point
that people could not identify why they were there, didn't have
a productive outcome. There was no clarity in it has
(05:47):
doubled since 2019 and most people are saying they're
spending five hours a week in unproductive meetings.
So that has doubled since pre pandemic times. 70% of senior
execs, which is ironic because they sit in positions of power
and influences power of influence.
They hopefully can influence these things.
(06:08):
They say meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
But the reason I kept that static because I was like 70%
like not only are all the peopleattending all the meetings or
being invited to all the meetings finding them painful,
but it is the senior execs that are saying that as well.
It's interesting digging beneaththose those stats.
(06:28):
I wonder if there's a couple of reasons behind it.
So like pre pandemic, more people, well, basically everyone
we're sitting in offices together.
And so I suspect there may be interesting to know if there was
higher informal meetings, interruptions or catch ups.
And then when we all went remoteand everyone had to figure out
how to work, we started having more structured sessions.
Has that now stayed? Is that actually a good thing
(06:50):
because it's reducing interruptions and informal sort
of you know, and also I think the 70% of senior execs, I would
understand that too because we've mentioned it a bit as
well. But when you are sitting at the
top and trying to move work forward and underneath you
there's a whole bunch of recurring meetings.
And just like people throwing things in each other's
(07:12):
calendars, you don't really control that.
And what you can control them. What we've seen executives do is
say no meetings on Monday, or let's scrap every recurring
meeting in the business and use that kind of high level
influence to get people to shortcircuit their habits and look at
how they rebuild meetings. Because we've seen this as well.
(07:33):
Unless you actually look at someone's calendar, and gosh,
what we wouldn't give to be ableto do calendar audits with
people who tell us they're overloaded, unless you actually
sit down and look through them, it's really hard to know what's
actually in someone else's calendar, how they participate,
what they prep for, whether they're paying attention, like
you actually don't know. So it's kind of really hard to
do on math. You know what?
(07:54):
That's fair. Premium power suit coming your
way. I love that suggestion.
And I might add that of my 9 meetings, one to two of them
were 15 minute meetings and productive.
Like really productive in 15 minutes.
One of them was a 30 minute meeting that we concluded in 20
minutes. The other was a 30 minute
meeting that we concluded in about 18 minutes.
(08:15):
So I think that's worth pointingout that when I say 9, some of
them were like, you know, short,sharp and we, you know, got some
good stuff done because we are getting really good at that
because we have to I just. I feel like we have a slight
caveat in that we're doing a lotof business development.
And I think if you talk to any people in business development,
their calendar is quite rightly stacked with talking to
(08:37):
strangers. And secondly, we work with a lot
of people we're not used to working with.
So when we're planning these events, they'll be in
organizations with people who are working out their side of
things. And that often is the case when
you are new to working with eachother.
But between you and I, as we know how each other works more
we divide and separate work. We need far fewer meetings to
(08:58):
get the same level of collaboration because we know
how each other works. So I think we are somewhat of an
exception. And I think in some roles, lots
of consultants, client facing roles, meetings, a lot about
forming relationships, forming away of working.
And it's just when they sort of become on autopilot and you're
(09:19):
doing the same meetings with thesame group of people that there
are real opportunities to challenge whether or not that
same amount of time investment is needed and or the most
effective way to collaborate andshare ideas and knowledge and
solutions and decisions and whatever else it might be.
Yeah. And we are going to get to that
as well. I just want to share a few
(09:39):
insights that I heard on the road and in the mini master
class we did in the session a couple weeks ago on Calendar
Killers. And these feel like a few
themes. So the first theme is that we
asked a lot of people and we usually do in in a few different
types of sessions we hold. Now, when's your magic hour?
When are you at peak clarity? When are you doing your best
work? Turns out that people, when you
(10:01):
ask a room of people, do you have meetings throughout the
entire week? In your magic hour, all the
hands on the room go up. So that's the first kind of aha
moment. We're hoping can I challenge
that as well though because I feel like when I'm in a meeting
I'm on like I actually need to be at peak focus.
Otherwise, why am I in the meeting?
Research has shown that mid energy is great for
(10:21):
collaboration and and sales meetings and actually it's the
deep focus alone work that should be doing your magic hour.
That is what actually a few studies have shown.
So there is a difference between.
And make meetings less effectivebecause people are sort of half
there. Because I'm thinking about some
of the like kind of workshoppy style meetings I've had where
(10:44):
it's like full on brain power needed.
This is, I suppose if it's like a team all hands where it's more
conveying information. 100% facethe 9% is.
How 100? Percent is that and how long
should they be? If if it's more, sit back, relax
and you know, kick the news while someone talks at you.
(11:05):
I think the less, I think the suggestion out of this is map
the type of energy to your map the type of meeting to your
energy level. And my feeling in the room is
they would have been low energy meetings that are still
critical. Yes, could have been shorter,
maybe doesn't need to be as recurring, you know, all that
stuff, hygiene stuff, but that happened to be where they could
have been doing deep focus work and solving complex problems as
(11:27):
it relates to their individual work.
So let's just generalize that. There felt as though multiple
time zones was interesting people that really did have to
collaborate and be on meetings at random hours.
That's a thing, increasingly a thing.
And then another thing that was interesting was that people got
(11:49):
to the end of their work day andthen had to do their work and
they were leading into overtime because of meetings.
Yeah. And, and I think this is, this
is one of those interesting, like collaboration is half the
job, surely, like there is got to be a lot of coming together
and sharing stuff. So, but what's interesting, and
we covered this in our last week's mini master class around
(12:12):
calendar killers that we sort ofsee a meeting as a discreet
thing. And we don't think about the
prep, we don't think about the context switching and we
definitely don't think about allthe actions and work that falls
out of some meetings. And so that leads us to sort of
fill our days with meetings and not account for all the other
stuff that needs to be done. I've also seen another set that
(12:32):
you've jotted down around managers and how long they spend
in meetings. And this is one of those really
fascinating other switches that I've started to see anecdotally
is managers are now not just leading teams, but they're often
also, as we are asked to do morewith less in the work as well.
And when you look at like a teamof let's say even 8, that's 81
(12:53):
on ones that should be happeningweekly or fortnightly to check
in with people plus team meetings plus.
And you see how that stacks up. And I just wonder if the idea of
everyone gets the same sort of like this hammer to the same
nail of if you're a team leader,does every single person want a
weekly one-on-one to some peopleon a monthly one?
(13:13):
Who, who are you more? Who are the people who sort of
need more emotional support going through a tough time,
whatever it might be? And who are the people who
actually might just want to do awalking meeting with you and
chicken once a month, whatever it might be, But also really
working on your how do you get updates?
I always talk about this becauseit was such a, a light bulb for
(13:35):
me, but also saw the tension at the time.
Our CTO at our last company asked his engineering leads to
send him just a daily diary, quick notes of what they covered
that day rather than having catch UPS regularly.
They hated it to start. They felt like it was sort of
micromanaging or overseeing, buta, they felt like by having to
have that accountability, they really did focus a lot more on
(13:58):
what the top priorities were. But secondly, it saved them a
ton of time having to catch up really regularly.
So very quickly they went from resisting to like really big
fans of that approach. So sort of embracing that
experimental mindset of like, let's try and set ourselves a
goal of reducing one hour a weekof meetings.
What could we try differently this week?
(14:19):
And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
But like, what could we test? Feels like a nice attitude given
this like calendar crunch. Feels like it's an epidemic now.
It is. And I appreciate that you shared
that tip because I'd like to share another tip and I think
we'll just roll back and forth with a few tips here for the
rest of our podcast. But what I do want to point out
(14:40):
with how you said the three things every morning and the
micromanaging thing when we did drinks with power suitors in
person, we're doing a bunch of that now as well.
One person was chatting about not getting time with her
manager and I suggested that at the start of every Monday,
rather than ask for work in progress meeting with her
(15:02):
manager, send the three things that are top of mind or top
priority that you have on this Monday.
Send those to your manager and be like, I'm working on these
three things. I, I need you to know this and I
need you to unblock this. So it's just short, sharp.
And I think we have talked aboutthis in a past episode.
And then someone across the table who was a people manager
LED about eight people said, Oh my goodness, if I got 8 emails
(15:25):
every Monday just like that, that would solve so many
problems for me and mental load.And I'm like, love it.
That was great. Backing off off of your
suggestion of experimenting withsomething.
(16:26):
Why are we spending time together?
Can you help me? And like just kind of throwing
more challenges at their manager, rightly or wrongly?
No, it's not even rightly or wrongly, it's probably more
career experience or stage that as you get more experience, you
start to feel more comfortable and and take more ownership over
your workload and and keeping other people updated.
(16:46):
When you're quite early on, I don't think you should be
expected to do this, but if you do, you'll be rocking and out
through your career. Another meeting tip I've got is
90% of all meetings in most people's calendars are
reoccurring and they're called ghost meetings now because
they've been recurring for so long that people just expect
them. They start to go and multitask
(17:07):
in them and they do something else they check out because it's
just yet another reoccurring meeting that is may not be
adding as much value as originally intended.
So my tip is to if you have a reoccurring meeting that you
own, why is it still serving itspurpose?
Is the length serving its purpose?
Who is in the room serving its purpose, be it online or in
(17:29):
person? And secondly, if you are an
invitee to a reoccurring meeting, have a conversation
with those exact same things if you are not the owner of that
meeting. That's my next tip.
Yeah. And also I think it was Rachel
Fitz, John was talking about oneon ones and really impactful one
on ones and he suggested what was that?
Every six months you hold quite a different style.
(17:50):
And I and I wonder with these reoccurring meetings or with
your team catch UPS, you just plan for every month to go, oh,
what are all the meetings we have on that are recurring,
let's do an audit and let's try and cut one or change one or
change the amount of time. So actively managing them rather
than sit and forget. I really like that.
What about the collaboration trap?
(18:11):
I think this is something that when you think about the
meetings you're in, and I suspect this is what you were
alluding to with the sort of midto low energy when you
participate. If you are a need to be across
but not active participant, you're probably only needing to
be low in G to attend a meeting.If you are facilitating the
meeting or really actively involved in collaboration, you
(18:32):
might need to be high energy. So what you could probably take
from this is the people who aren't super involved maybe
don't need to be there. And we've often said no one
wants to be an observer in a meeting, but there are all sorts
of tools and ways we can now disseminate information and
include people without inviting them to a meeting.
I got really obsessed with loom videos for a while.
(18:54):
There's other simple ways of doing it where you might go.
Here's what I'm working on. Click through showcase, here's
three questions. Black there in an e-mail if
anyone wants to chat about this further.
Let's book a meeting if you're all comfortable with it.
Let's not notes after the meetings.
We've all got robots now take those notes.
Let them send them out to everyone have again this is that
(19:17):
sort of like don't sit and forget have actual rules about
what needs to be true in order to say yes to a meeting and
check in with your team. Did we all say no to something?
Who went to a meeting that they felt like, let's highlight those
meetings we went to that we didn't feel like we added any
value to? And let's look at creating rules
to make sure that we have permission to say no.
(19:38):
So like all those things are really easy ways to still get
that valuable collaboration without just sort of throwing
people at it who may or may not be the right people at the time.
Yeah. My last tip is because you've
covered so many and it actually goes back to something you said
at the beginning was the why of the meeting.
And that's something I think we are particularly good at is
(20:03):
being really explicit why we're meeting.
There is obviously a tool calledan agenda should you wish,
particularly if it is a meeting that is, you know, 6 to 8
people. An agenda will keep you to time
to task. There's a really clear outcome
of the meeting or a decision of the meeting if it is a much
smaller meeting. Make sure that the person, the
(20:25):
other person that is coming in on the meeting with you is very
clear on why we are meeting. What is the expected outcome or
the decision or what does success look like for that
meeting so that the minute you leave, you've got your next
steps to carry on. So be clear on why you're
meeting. If you're in a meeting and you
do not understand the why, again, great conversation to
(20:46):
chat about with your manager, the owner of the meeting, to
start getting some meeting hygiene there.
Yeah. I feel like I've just started
reworking on an old diagram we've done about should it be a
meeting? And it's worth checking out our
newsletter in a couple of weeks because no, no, probably this
week time. What is time about what?
What defines whether or not it should be in a meeting?
(21:08):
Because I think even things likeis it urgent?
How long does this need even things like making a decision
quite often depending on your personality type and how you
think. Like I think by talking I can
think quickly on the spot. I assume everyone else can.
That's ridiculous. Other people like to go away and
read things and process it and then come up with a decision.
(21:29):
Is a meeting the right context to get the best brains making a
decision, or should you be sending that context beforehand
and just asking for the decisionasynchronously?
Same goes with urgency. We have a tendency to think
what's top of mind for us is topof mind for everyone else.
But often the stuff we're working on, especially if you
really master your calendar likeI think you and I do, we're
(21:51):
working three weeks out Max minimum from deadlines a lot of
the time. So lots of flexibility baked in
to go. We've got three weeks still
before we need to get this done,but we're plunking it in now.
So we've got way ability to think about it follow on time
for follow on actions if we needto.
It is such a stress reducer rather than sort of, yeah,
winding up with having to do everything once the deadline.
(22:15):
Yeah, that, that was I, I reckonthat's the final thing from my
side is just really be thoughtful as you go.
One, one thing that I heard of that flummoxed me a little bit
because I didn't experience thisper SE, was people that book
meetings upon meetings because Inever had a calendar that
(22:35):
allowed that and I didn't know how to respond in the moment.
I know there are some tools thatyou can use to automatically
decline when you are clearly booked, but I I just thought is
it a tool problem or is it like why are there meetings being
booked upon meetings? I think it's a combination of
(22:55):
things. I I've definitely been in that
position. I think if you're someone who
time blocks your whole calendar looks busy.
So when people really do want totalk to you, they're like, well,
I'm just going to have to book atime anytime that Secondly, if
you meeting with 75710 people, finding a time that everyone
works for everyone, probably notgoing to happen.
(23:17):
So my suspicion is the people who are the least needing to be
there get the meetings booked over, in which case it's a good
time to go. Do I need to attend?
So there's a couple of reasons why and I think the tools might
help with auto decline, but my suspicion is a lot of people
won't use them because if your manager books that meeting and
you order decline, that might lead to some tension.
(23:37):
So it, it may be more to your point meeting hygiene around.
OK, so now I've been double booked.
Firstly, I'm going to check thatit's double booked before
accepting it. And then secondly, prioritize
those two meetings. Which one's the most important
is one with just one other person?
Can I shrink it down to 15 minutes?
Can I remove it? And we do it asynchronously and
(23:57):
use each of those opportunities to really challenge yourself to
clear out your calendar rather. Yeah, just because I do feel
like the automatic decline is probably only effective for
certain situations. And it is really hard.
Everyone's operating under calendar crunch.
Gosh, wouldn't we love to live in a world where everyone did
think a lot before putting in yet another meeting?
(24:20):
But we can probably take their ownership a little bit on
ourselves. And like with everything power
suit, don't change the world. Like, don't clear out your
entire calendar. If you can free up 30 minutes
this week, amazing. And if next week you can free up
another 30, amazing. Even around the edges.
Not, you know, rather than the stuff that you have to go.
Sure, that feels too hard to change right now.
(24:41):
Yeah, and I and I wonder if meeting length is kind of my
ending note, then my new ending note.
And that is, Oh my gosh, when people used to book half an
hour, 60 minutes with me, I was like, why?
Like we're massive fans and we've said it a bunch of times,
but like 15 minute meeting people is gold.
You can get a lot done if you'vegot AY and agenda and it makes
sense. Obviously not necessarily a
(25:03):
meeting with eight people with abig decision, complex decision,
but certainly for a lot of meetings, I suspect some of them
can be shorter. So even if you just take note
this week after you listen to this podcast every time you're
in a meeting, should it have been that length?
Should it have been a meeting? Was there a clear why to the
meeting? A bunch of these things is, you
(25:24):
know, was there anyone missing, key decision makers missing, Why
are you even meeting, you know, so on and so forth.
So just take notice like you said, take notice and then make
one small change. Yeah, I mean, it does.
When you said that, I was like, I don't even know if we've
adapted meetings since we've started to have like
collaborative tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs
where you can actually just get out of dock and all be in there
(25:46):
making changes. Like we still act like those
things don't exist, where a lot of the time you actually can
suggest changes and work on a shared.
Even if you turn an agenda into a shared output, you can do a
lot of that in your own time. So yeah, it is.
It's funny how we just haven't really rethought a lot of these
things as technology has evolved.
And so we sort of using old tools where there's plenty
(26:09):
better ones now. Forward this podcast everyone.
To everyone, blame Power Suit onbringing up the conversation of
meetings in your organization byforwarding it along.
We would love to be the bearers of judgement and no, no
optimization. No, I mean I can only imagine
people will be praising us surely.
(26:31):
That's right, That's right. We would love who.
Likes meetings? Yeah, please forward this on
also. We would love that as well to
increase our listenership. We'd love that.
More power suitors, more joy. So check out powersuit.com.
Everyone, if you have a topic that you want us to cover, just
flip it to us at Hello app, powersuit.com and we'll catch
y'all next time. Bye.
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