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I Hate Meetings
Or, How I Clawed Back the Time Wasted in Meetings and Made Everyone on My Scrum Team Happier
Recently, I ascended to a position on a scrum team where I get to make decisions about meetings. The first thing I decided was I wanted meetings to be short and infrequent. So I started working out ways to reclaim those minutes. Hopefully, I can help you do the same.
Before we get stuck in though, let’s define a meeting as two or more people using some method to engage in real-time communication, usually for business purposes.
Meetings with a clear agenda are more efficient. However, if it’s the first time everyone is seeing the agenda, you’re going to lose time while people process it. Then, before you can discuss each item, you’ll need to wait while people gather their thoughts.
The solution I landed on was to distribute the agenda before the meeting, allowing people to prepare their own material or send me questions they want addressed. I put it in the calendar invite so everyone can see the latest version.
While this did eliminate dead time during the meeting, it wasn’t giving the efficiency boost I was hoping for. So I started thinking about the time I spent being bored in meetings. The three things that came to mind immediately were status updates, conversations that only involved some of the participants, and talking about what was going good or bad.
The first thing we did to eliminate status updates was move the daily standup to Slack. We had eight people across multiple disciplines on this project, and while we were all working towards the same goal, our work didn’t overlap. So, for fifteen minutes every day we listened to people talk about things that we didn’t understand and didn’t care about. Fifteen minutes may not seem like much time, but eight people standing around for fifteen minutes is two hours’ worth of working time, to say nothing of the time it takes to refocus after the meeting.
By moving the standup to Slack, we were able to lower each person’s commitment to about a minute per day, and we created a written record, accessible from anywhere with the internet, of what everyone was doing. It also increased work flexibility, as we weren’t bound to an exact time to give our…
