Meeting smells in your own notes

Some meetings are bad, others are useless, some of them are helpful. One thing that I discovered over time is that if you have a good template for notes, you can use them to take the temperature and discover smells.

It is not a tip you can use just after one meeting, it is something that you should analyze over time. And of course, it is different for each company and person, so you may apply at your own discretion. In my case, I use the Quadrant Method, but it could work with other templates as long as they keep different sections separated.

The five things you could detect, using your notes as empirical data, are:

• Too many meetings.
• Too many people.
• This meeting could have been an email.
• Why am I here?
• This is not going anywhere.

Too many meetings

If you ask me, I will always say that I have too many meetings no matter what :-)

A good rule of thumb is to measure the amount per week or even if you have more than one per day too often. Keeping the date of the meeting and indexing by it makes it easy to detect if the volume of meetings is a one-time thing, or something that happens so often.

A lot of companies have too many meetings, but it is different arguing with data than just complaining like everybody does. In the next sections you will find other smells that explain why you could be involved in too many meetings.

Too many people

If you have not enough space to write down the name of all people in the meeting, that is a clear sign that there are more people than needed. There are two bad things with that:

• It is a pretty expensive meeting because there are a lot of people in a passive mode that are not working also not attending the meeting contents.
• Probably nothing useful will happen because too many people cannot interact easily, specially if it is an online meeting.

Sometimes if the meetings are recurring over time, there are people that were invited once and never removed from the meeting again.

This one is directly related to the next point.

This meeting could have been an email

When the meeting finishes and I only wrote down on the left side of my template, that is a clear signal that the meeting could have been an email.

It is pretty common in a lot of companies to call people into a meeting to tell something, that could have been a video, a document, or any other format that could be consumed later. The usual “informative” meeting. If you are the manager try to find another way to make the information flow, if not, you could try to help with new ideas on how to transmit the information.

It is common when a manager wants to tell something, and it is one of the reasons why too many people could be invited.

Why am I here?

There are times when the meeting was useful, but I didn’t interact and I exited from it without actions to be made or led by me. If that starts to happen too often, the best thing you can do is to ask to be removed from the meeting, or asking why you should go. It is not helpful for you or the meeting success to attend just because you were invited.

This is not going anywhere

The last smell happens too often, and it can develop in different ways.

There is a case where no questions nor actions were discussed, in that way it is going to be a useless meeting that is not going to have any action taken. The other side of this case is when there are actions but no people were assigned to them, it is nearly the same, because there is no one to lead the execution of those actions. Accountability is pretty important, specially in large teams.

The other case is when there are tons of actions. Even if they are assigned to someone, it is possible they are no ideal actions and too much job is happening in parallel, so there is a risk to end with nothing or end with the wrong thing.

All the previous smells are pretty common, and a lot of people feel like it is happening to them. And probably it is happening to them. However, having a tool to show the (actual) information to your manager will help to act on it, and maybe the company would change the way they schedule and host meetings to be more useful.

Misc and references

• Feature photo from Unseen Studio in Unsplash