How this world works
Over half of my nearly twenty years of work experience has been in client-facing consulting roles. This is an environment where you are required to track your time daily, submit your timesheets at least weekly and bill clients based on the number of hours spent on their job.
In the world of billable hours, it is very clear from the time tracking system at the end of each week, month, quarter and year who has put in the hard work and who hasn’t. And the data is available to employees nation-wide.
If you’re a manager or above, you are also looking after your team’s results. You need to check whether they’ve lodged their timesheets on time, how they’ve spent their time and whether they have enough work on for the next few weeks or months.
How this can help you
If you’re not used to the concept of timesheets or this level of performance-related transparency, this environment may sound a bit stressful. And I’ll be honest with you, it can be at times.
However, I am not saying that this model is bad. Consulting firms need to have some way of measuring ‘production’, as well as projecting and tracking revenue and costs from client engagements.
It provides enormous clarity for employees, who know upfront what is required and how they can get there. It also teaches you to have a continuing focus on productivity and to always be mindful about how you spend your time.
This mindset helped me perform at a high level in my other, non-consulting roles.
To help you better manage your and your team’s time, I’ve applied this mindset to the example of meetings below. I picked meetings because in most of my non-consulting roles, I heard so many colleagues complain about the number of meetings they have to attend and that this often doesn’t leave them with enough time for their ‘real work’.
In my experience, the larger the organisation and/or the more risk averse, the bigger the ‘too many meetings’ syndrome is.
Time is money.
I’m not saying that other industries aren’t aware of this but in consulting time is literally money. Billing by the hour makes you hyperaware of how you’re spending your and your colleagues’ time.
As such, the aim is to keep internal, non-billable meetings to a minimum. Most internal meetings only last 30 minutes and are often held outside of regular office hours, such as right before the start of or right after the official workday. Non-essential training sessions are often held during the lunch break.
This approach ensures that you still have your regular hours open for billable work. It also means that you can be out at a client site during their working hours. This is because your job is to work with clients and not attend random meetings.
This level of clarity is really helpful when you are prioritising your time and managing expectations within the firm. Everyone knows the client comes first and your boss will not be upset if you prioritise a client meeting over an internal meeting.
How you can apply this mindset
A good place to start is by revisiting the meetings you are currently attending and organising.
First of all, decide that each meeting you attend needs to bring you closer to your goals, whether strategic, operational, project or your individual performance goals (or all of those combined).
Then, take a sample of a couple of weeks or one month and rate everything in your diary based on the degree to which it brings you closer to your goals.
Don’t overthink it. Print out your diary and work through this quickly, assigning a low, medium or high rating.
So, how much space are those low-value meetings taking up in your diary?
Tackling low-value meetings
Decline as many as you can but remember to be respectful by either explaining that you’re overcommitted or, where needed, by providing an alternative solution. For example, you could ask the organiser to share the minutes after the meeting so that you can still be across the discussion. Taking a couple of minutes to review the meeting outcomes is still better than spending an hour or more attending it.
Another option is to delegate attendance to someone from your team who can brief you at your regular catch ups or via email, if really needed. Just be careful about assigning attendance to someone that is already overworked (usually your go-to, right-hand person). Be creative – think about someone that is keen to step up and that would be excited about the opportunity to participate. Build that succession pipeline.
Tackling medium-value meetings
Now this is a tough category. It’s easy to assign a low value to things you don’t care about and a high value to the ones you do. (And, let’s face it, most of the high-value ones are the meetings you organised or initiated. Just saying.)
Many of these medium-value meetings are ones that you don’t really care about but feel obliged to attend, such as those your boss delegated to you. And some of these meetings require your personal attendance to model behaviour or support a cause.
If you can’t delegate attendance to someone else, you could try attending every other meeting, asking the organiser to turn the weekly meeting to a fortnightly or monthly meeting, or to shorten them from one hour to 30 or even 15 minutes.
If these are catch-up meetings, you could try converting some of them to quick stand-up meetings, which only last from 5 to 15 minutes, or to lunch dates so you are tackling three things at once (catching up, eating and bonding).
Tackling high-value meetings
As I mentioned above, many of these are ones you’ve initiated or organised so you will need to tackle them differently.
Of course you are planning to attend. However, here you need to think about the value of this meeting for others and the overall project or initiative, as well as the cost in time that could be spent on other things. Consider inviting less people, making them less frequent or shorter.
Remember that if you’re high enough in the hierarchy, many of the people invited will feel obliged to attend regardless of whether they find the meeting valuable or not. If it’s a recurring meeting, invite their feedback on whether it’s useful, how long or frequent it should be and how the agenda or format could be improved. That’s also good leadership.
Making meetings more intentional
Random meetings with no purpose don’t belong in your nor your colleagues’ diary.
Try to make sure that every meeting you initiate is clearly linked to your desired work results. It may seem a bit tiring at first, as you are working on taming your urge to book a meeting before carefully thinking the need for it through, but know that this extra effort will pay off.
For each meeting you book, set clear objectives for what you want to get out of it and share them with the participants. This could just be a few quick bullet points in the invite, which will also help you decide how long the meeting should be. If you only have a couple of points to cover, there is no need to book a one-hour meeting.
Another thing to try is booking 30-minute meetings by default and only booking one-hour meetings where the agenda is longer.
Try something even more simple but radical
If you don’t want to spend time doing the rating and culling exercise above, establish a preventative system where you block off 60% of your week upfront, such as all of your afternoons and all-day Friday. This is the time you protect and use for your ‘actual work’ or keep as your ‘white space’ that you can use for strategising, reflecting, team bonding and putting out those inevitable fires.
When you know you only have 40% of your week for meetings, you will naturally be more selective about the invites you accept.
If you can swing it, you could be even more ruthless and say that (apart from the occasional board meeting) you are only prepared to spend two hours on meetings each day, say from 10 am to 12 pm.
In any case, the point is to take control by setting an intention and then protecting your time.
Any thoughts?
Was this helpful? Do you have any other ways to tackle ‘too many meetings’ syndrome? Contact me and share your thoughts.
Thanks for taking the time to read the post.