Meetings: Background Noise

I just got off of a conference call where something was flapping and ticking in the background on someone’s phone – annoying.  Distracting. 

And distracting means ineffective.
Lots of meetings these days take place over the phone.  If you’re on one of these virtual meetings, watch your own background noise.  Dogs barking, fans blowing, wind coming in from the window over speaker phone, kids bursting in, keyboard clicking next to speaker, and on it goes.  Here’s what happens: we hear a strange noise on the conference call and our brains wonder what it is.  Our attention gets pulled off what’s going on.  Then you get annoyed, wondering if other people hear that noise.  Then finally someone says, “please put your phone on mute.”  By that time, the people in the meeting have lost focus – not in a big way, but enough.Solution?  Use a headset.  Also, if you’re not sure if your environment is quiet enough, do a test call with a friend.

Meetings: Protect Your Calendar

Your calendar should reflect what your working on and what your goals are.  Think of your calendar as a place where time is blocked out to do things.  Too often we think of our calendars as a place just for meetings.  Then what happens is someone sees a blank spot and schedules another meeting.  Before you know it, your day is mostly meetings.  Some people have this odd feeling of accomplishment when their days ARE filled with meetings, “look at me, I’m really busy.”   Busy isn’t what we should be striving for, we should be striving for effective.  If your day is filled with meetings, then you’re ineffective.  Period.  Yeah you might have a day filled with meetings once in a while.  That happens.  But every week?  That’s just plain ineffective.

If you follow David Allen’s, Getting Things Done approach to time management, you know you have a list of projects, which cascade into tasks.  Say you need to draft a copy of a document.  You should have that time blocked off on your calendar, especially those that have a specific due date coming up.  Anything you systematically need time for should be on your calendar, like doing email, doing your weekly review, etc.

Meetings: You Should Say No More Often

You get invited to a meeting – in fact you probably get asked to attend meetings many times a day. If you’re in a virtual environment where you get electronic requests to dial in, there’s usually a simple ‘Accept’, ‘Reject’, and ‘Tentative’ button to acknowledge the request. It’s so easy to hit that ‘Accept’ request button if it says you have time on your calendar. Guess what?

YOU CAN SAY NO!

In fact, you should probably say ‘no’! You should probably say no ½ the time! I’m serious! Just say no! Yeah you have to think about it: are you a key decision maker, who’s doing the ask, and do you have some key deliverable to present, but most of the time you should say no. Manager Tools business consultants, Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne in their podcast, Calendar Control – Say No, advocate this very practice – say no. Bias towards no. Say no frequently.

Listen: you won’t be evaluated at the end of the year on how many meetings you went to or how ‘busy’ you were with meetings. You’ll be assessed on what you got done. Saying no frees up time to get work done.

DO: Open your calendar right now and decline a meeting – RIGHT NOW

DO: Say NO to a meeting today.

DO: Say no to a meeting everyday this week!

Meetings: Is Your Meeting Necessary?

Is there really a need to have a meeting? I mean, REALLY need one? Can the meeting objectives (if there are any) be accomplished through a memo, email, or a phone call to someone? When you schedule a meeting, it’s like you’re going to the organization and asking them to fund a project. Your asking people to set aside time and they only have so much to give. In the book Meeting Excellence, the first chapter is titled, “Is This Meeting Necessary?”. That IS the question! In Read Before Our Next Meeting, Pittampalli says that people can read, so send them a memo! People should do work BEFORE the meeting and make decisions AT the meeting.

Making a withdrawal from the ‘time bank’ of the company is a big deal. Have too many meetings and you might get someone laid off. 30minutes doesn’t seem like much. Multiply that times hundreds of employees who think the same and go ahead and schedule that meeting and that’s some serious time/money. Your bias should be to not have the meeting. In today’s meeting culture the bias is to have the meeting. And today’s meeting culture is killing us.

DO: Pick up the phone and call someone instead of having the meeting!

DO: Can you leverage some social media in the company to have the dialog, list a discussion forum, company twitter like tool?