You know the feeling. You get to the end of the day and suddenly realise you have been really busy but achieved little or nothing. There is no way you can define your day as effective. So, where does all the time go?
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review gives us a clue. The average number of hours per week that executives spent in meetings during the 20th century was 10 hours per week. Pre pandemic this had risen to 23 hours per week on average. Assuming a 40 hour week then this means that more than 50% of the working day is spent on average in meetings. How many of those meetings actually achieve anything? More interestingly, how many of those meetings could achieve exactly the same amount in a fraction of the time?
A few blogs ago we looked at How To Hold An Effective Meeting and so there is no need to repeat that here. The question with regard to meetings now is how many are actually necessary at all? How many achieve any kind of meaningful outcome? Shopify began 2023 by famously cancelling all recurring meetings with more than two employees. The instruction was not to add them back for at least two weeks and only then if they were truly essential. The shocking thing is that the total of these meetings pre-arranged for 2023 was estimated to be 76,000 hours. This means that even if 90% of them were added back the company would still save 7,600 hours a year or the equivalent of 3 full time employees. When businesses are often complaining they are understaffed I would suggest this is a great place to look for more productive hours. Government please take note – if you want to increase productivity then look to meeting reduction.
Here’s a suggestion that I like in order to reduce the number of meetings. Everyone who organises a meeting has to state in advance how that meeting will effectively move the organisation toward it’s objective and then at the end of every meeting must, as part of the minutes conclude if that goal has been met or not. In larger organisations there could be a departmental budget for meetings based on the cost of holding them according to who was present and any transport costs involved. Departments could then see how much meetings have actually cost versus their results!!!!
Not all meetings are a waste of time. We need a forum for new ideas. Effective meetings are where ideas are discussed, new things are considered and effective ways to enable the overall objective to be achieved planned. These are the meetings we require. This is how we use meetings to their best. Not simply as a means of sharing information. Maybe meeting organisers could be given credits for the amount of new ideas that were floated and discussed during the meeting!!
Emails are the other trauma of modern life and are now often used instead of meetings. You know, those copy all emails. All this does is replace a very ineffective way of communicating with a very, very ineffective way. These emails waste huge amounts of time and my only piece of advice is to let everyone play the “answer all” game and then wait until everything has settled down to respond. If an email to everyone is required responses should be to the sender only and not everyone on the list. It is then the responsibility of the sender to collate the responses and then communicate those.
A great exercise would be to log the amount of time that people take responding to internal emails. The cost of this form of communication could then be evaluated. Chances are that would lead to a very quick TEAMS or ZOOM meeting which would be much more effective.
We need to make the use of our time more effective. Technology is making it easier and easier for us to not only waste our own time but that of other people as well.
Personally, in order to find out where does all the time go I suggest a time tracker and a system we discussed in an earlier blog Four Coloured Traffic Lights See what you think.
I know where all my time goes, I just need to do something about it. What about you?
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