Saying no to more meetings

- Hi, my name is Alan Hall. I've experienced meetings and large multinationals and smaller organizations. And I've been just as dissatisfied as Kevin with many of them. However, I also realized that especially when I was a younger manager there are some good aspects to meetings which I'm keen to preserve. If we're going to reduce the number of meetings we attend, a great place to start is by accepting fewer invitations. If you do this systematically you will quickly save time, cost and energy. Let's look at which invites you should push back against and how to do this without causing unnecessary offense or conflict. Now, there are of course, lots of meetings where attending is a great use of your time. These are typically when you are working collaboratively with colleagues to solve a problem or make decisions or complete some work that needs intensive communication. Meetings can also be useful to build relationships or deal with sensitive issues where an email or call may not be enough. However, it's not hard to spot the meeting invites that are not a good use of your time. Usually, these invitations don't have an agenda or will include topics that are irrelevant to you. If you have no role except to listen or the outcomes could be delivered in another way such as by sending information by email then it's probably not worth attending. We do, however, have to find ways to push back against these invitations gracefully. As some people can take it personally if you decline their meeting invites. The first thing to do is to ask for an agenda or details from the organizer of what they would like from you specifically, so that you can prepare properly. Ask whether you could meet the needs of the meeting organizer in another way, perhaps by giving them the information they need before the meeting. If there is a colleague attending could you brief them instead or ask them to inform you of the outputs of the meeting? If the meeting organizer has good reasons for you to attend, this initial conversation will help you be much better prepared than other attendees. If there is only a specific part of the meeting that's relevant, it may be possible for you to attend just that topic. If the meeting involves travel, you may be able to join by video conference just for that item. Most people find that by putting a barrier in the way of accepting meeting invites enables you to turn down several meetings a week. Why not set yourself a target and start now.