I started working for myself in August of 2007. Before that point — say, July — I had been working as a corporate wonk. The people I worked with, they really knew how to meet.
Things changed for me almost immediately when I went freelance, though, and there were suddenly real dollars associated with my time. Was it really useful having me in a client meeting, for example, when the client knew that it would cost them something just to have me sit there and look pretty? Sure, I would dress up and all, but was it important that I be there? Would I be a contributor?
Ninety-percent of the time, I wasn’t needed. Instead, I’d get an email or a Skype call from a contact with a list of things to think about, a list of things to respond to, and a list of things to actually do. Each of them easy to communicate in a quick call or an email, none of them specifically outcomes of the meeting itself.
I ran a test with a client recently testing this theory on project team meetings. These folks were meeting together twice weekly, two hours per meeting, for status updates. Four hours a week, by nine attendees, is 36 hours of meeting time in a week. My hypothesis was simply that a large part of that 36 hours per week could be put toward actual project work.
So I built a matrix of team members with their annualized hourly rate attached to it. At the end of each day, the meeting organizer — usually the project manager, but could have been anyone on the team — was asked to mark down on the matrix just how much they spent of company money having each attendee in the meeting.
At first, we didn’t tell the team members that their time was being measured this way. After the first week, the project manager had tallied over $1500 in meeting money that he’d spent on a week of status meetings.
The second week, we filled in the rest of the team.
OK, the results were pretty predictable. When team members are aware of their cost to the project, the cost of their time, they get creative with their activity. By the fifth week, status meetings were back to weekly, and down to a half hour each. Their Basecamp use went way up, email task assignment blossomed, and project work became the real work of the project — not just more meta-project meeting-filler.
Seth Godin has a quick rundown of meeting do’s and don’t’s that is pretty clever. Check it out and see if you can make your meetings irrelevant.