“Since we started the new approach, I hardly ever get any work done,
because we have so many meetings.” That is a sentiment, I here quite
often when I’m visiting clients who have just started with some new
approach. Surprisingly often that is the case if that new approrach is
some flavor of “Agile.”
This seems more frequent if the client is a large corporation, but it
certainly also happens at startups and SMEs.
And yet, on the other hand it seems to be increasingly hard to get
any meetings scheduled. Let’s look at some approaches to make things a
bit more manageable again
Once we start to differentiate between meetings that generate work
and meetings that get work done it starts to get easier to handle the
workload.
As described below, once we start making that distinction we can
apply strategies like
- planning the Work instead of the meetings (allocating time in my
calendar for “getting stuff done” – especially helpful when applied –and
negotiated– on a team or even multi-team level)
- conscious capacity allocation (I will have 3,5 hours of working time
and 3,5 hours of meeting time each day)
- Actively keeping buffers open for unexpected, short term
interactions (Putting blockers in my calendar that I remove only shortly
before they are due)
Now let’s look at these strategies in detail:
Two types of meetings
Some people (maybe many) tend to view all meetings as “a waste of
time” and “not real work” – I beg to differ.
I would say that we need to differentiate between meetings that leave us
with more work than before and meetings that leave us with less work
than before.
Work generating
meetings (coordination time)
Some meetings leave us with more work than we had when before we
attended the meeting.
- Planning meetings, where the actual purpose of the meeting is to
find or define work that needs to be done.
- Status meetings, where the original intention is just to ”get in
sync” but where it often happens that someone realized: ”oh, and we have
to do X”
- Knowledge sharing meetings, where not everyone affected is invited
and thus we need to share the knowledge again.
- Knowledge building and gathering meetings where the purpose is to
better understand something, we didn’t fully understand before – be it a
user interview in a product development company, a design session for
something be build ourselves, some kind of process improvement meeting,
or something else in the same vain.
This list is of course by no means conclusive, but it should give you
an idea of the kind of meetings that could be put in that category.
Meetings that get
work done (creation time)
On the other hand there are meetings that actually get work done.
Especially for work that needs more than one person to complete it.
- Design Sessions that end with decisions.
- Pair-Writing an article or a piece of software
- Co-creating an outline for an offer
- Co-Creating the calculations for next years budget (if your company
still does budgeting the old way)
Try not to mix the two types of meetings. At least not too much.
Especially try to make the second kind of meeting really a meeting that
gets work done. As in done-done. Make sure that there is no ”X will
write this up, and we’ll review it it two days.”
If it’s good enough in the meeting, it’s probably good enough for
work.
If we introduce some kind of follow-up work, especially follow
up-work that has to be reviewed again, we actually prevent people from
using the result of the work we just did in that meeting. Try to make it
“good enough for now” and then let’s get on with creating value at other
places.
And if it takes too long to create those documents in the Meeting
with the tools you have available in the meeting, you probably have some
great opportunity to re-think your choice of tools.
With this in mind, let’s look at the three strategies in a bit more
detail.
And even though the strategies are persented in a specific order,
there is no real ordering between them. Each of them works well on it’s
own and you can combine them in any possible way.
Strategy one: Plan
the work, not the meetings
Even if you apply only this one strategy it can be a real game
changer.
Instead of keeping your agenda open for meetings and then work during
the few times where no meeting is scheduled, no meeting needs
preparation, and no meeting needs post-processing, switch it around.
Start by filling your schedule with “creation time” – time slots
where you intend to do the part of your work that directly creates
stuff. When you’re a knowledge worker in the times of a pandemic, this
might also include meetings, but those should be only meetings that
create tangible results. (This could be a design session with
colleagues if you’re in manufacturing, it could be an editing session on
a paper if you’re in academia, or maybe a pair- or mob- (ensemble)
programming session if you’re in software development. Any meeting that
outputs work.)
Only after you filled your schedule with a reasonable amount
of time allocated to ”creation time” fit those other things, that I like
to call “coordination time”, in some of the remaining spaces on your
calendar.
This “coordination time” can include planning, status updates,
learning and agreeing upon how you want to do things, understanding the
challenge you’re currently working on, and so on. It is basically the
coordination you need to efficiently get stuff done in the “creation
time.”
Some people tend to call only “creation time” Work and the
rest of the time Meetings. However, meetings that neither add
value through creation nor through a better understanding of who is
doing what when and how, should be eliminated altogether. And maybe
replaced by an e-mail or
Especially when we work on process improvements or introduce new
approaches we tend to start by planning when the related events (or
ceremonies to use an older term ;-) ) should occur to include all the
necessary participants.
I suggest to first try to agree upon the times out when all
the participants can do their “creation work” and then fit the events
and other necessary meetings around that.
Combining this approach with a conscious allocation on capacity makes
it even more powerful.
Strategy two:
Allocate capacity consciously
Don’t just look at the days of the week as a long stream of hours
passing by. Make a conscious decision on how to invest the time
beforehand.
If you’re involved with some kind of process framework you probably
have some of the time allocation already done for you “daily standups”,
“plannings”, “review” and “retrospectives” to name but a few.
But is the rest of the time really uniform? For most of us it isn’t.
It consists of periods where I can just chop away at my work, of periods
where I need information from other people and of periods where other
people need information from me.
Creating even an informal and rough plan of how you intend to
allocate your time helps a lot in reasoning about the number of meetings
and makes the gut feeling a lot more tangible and negotiable.
Such a rough and informal plan might just look like this:
Allocation per Week (on average)
Process related 4h (8h in total every two weeks)
Creating stuff 20h (4h per day)
Helping others 10h (2h per day)
Slack for surprises 6h (a bit over an hour per day)
With this little list it is already much easier to argue for or
against meetings. And if we start tracking how we actually use
our time against this list, it usually gets even more helpful. You might
want to give it a try.
Strategy three:
Plan your slack ahead of time
Just put “Slack Spacers” in your agenda and remove shortly before
their time comes up. This way if someone asks you whether you have time
for them today you might well be able to say “yes” without having to
move any other appointments.
To be able to react to things that are happening every systems needs
some slack. If there is not enough slack in the system every little
disruption or interference will wreak havoc on the system and might even
result in a total system breakdown.
Back in the seventies it was “common knowledge” that in knowledge
work one should never plan out more than 60% of one’s day. Simply
because “things will happen.” How does that fit in with calendars that
are filled up to the brim for the next two weeks?
If you allocate specific times for “creation work” and put them in
your calendar you might already have one thing that absorbs some of the
“things that happen”, but that’s not always quite what you intended to
do with those allocated time slots.
A simple and effective strategy to deal with this is the usage of
“Slack Spacers” – appointments with yourself, that are just in your
agenda to make sure you don’t plan too much of time too far in
advance.
Those could go from 30 minute slices which you remove on the evening
of the day before they come up to 4 hour slots twice a week which you
remove on Sunday evenings. Or any other sizing and timing that works for
you.
Depending on your environment you might either declare them for what
they are or hide them behind inconspicuous titles like “Preparation for
the XYZ project.”
Wrap-up
So these are three strategies you could put into effect right now
- Foster collaboration by planning the time you work together
- Get control of the amount of work you can do by allocating capacity deliberately
- Create maneuverability by explicitly blocking time for work that shows up unannounced.
till next time
Michael Mahlberg
