Meetings: where productivity goes to die

I love this image. The image of an empty meeting room, with the sign ‘Do Good Things’. This says everything I want to emphasise. Good things happen when meeting rooms are empty, not when they are full. This should not be news. The business world has long since understood that meetings are an absolute - categorical - waste of time. Academia - despite producing research that tells the business world just that - does not want to internalise this knowledge. Nothing productive happens at meetings. In fact, nothing happens at meetings.

Academia is full of what I think of as ceremonial meetings. Meetings where things USED to happen, but have long since stopped having any decisional making power due to restructuring of faculty and university power structures. Let’s take that great ceremonial: exam board meetings. In the old days, exam boards used to have decision making power - now, computer says yes or no and grade. It has all been decided before you step foot in the room, but because some University rule from 1922 - when exam boards last decided things - still says that exam boards must confirm the students’ results, we all sit in a room for 5 days hearing someone read out the equivalent of the football results. All numbers, all anonymised, no voting or decisions to be taken. What a giant waste of a week’s salary. Sitting in that room for one week - I actually did the calculation, combing and dividing the salary of colleagues present came to about £900,000 a day (without overheads) and I could not help but think there were better ways to spend this money. But these are not the only meetings that have become largely ceremonial. Boards of study meetings (all decisions taken elsewhere, these are now ‘informational’ one way stream to communicate things already decided). Ditto, school / faculty meetings. What about standard committee meetings, like ethics or research committee or teaching committee? Often what needs to be decided is minimal and as we learned in a pandemic, can be done both remotely and in about 30 minutes if everyone is concentrating. Not 3 hours.

What about really important meetings such as, say, academic promotion meetings? First, these happen once a year, not once a week, so a little time given over to this important service role is justifiable. They are predictable, you can schedule them at the beginning of the year. You can thus schedule your writing time around that meeting. There will be pre-reading which you allocate time for. Well, you ought to. If everyone has read the applications before hand, and there are clear criteria, this should not be the 5 hour marathon it has become. Ever seen someone start to read the applications in front of you for the first time? Let’s just say: preparation maketh the meeting. It maketh it much shorter than 5 hours.

What about research meetings amongst collaborators? Well, again, how many of these have no, or poorly defined, agendas (‘let’s have a catch up’) that can go all day or turn into some mega whine about all the things? What are the three things you need to decide? If there are any more than that, bump it to the next meeting. Short, focused, and on task. This is not a comment-more-than-a- question type of event, for the love of god, people have actual work to be doing.

No agenda, no meeting. Say it with me. No agenda, no meeting.

Frankly most meetings are not for decision making. They are for already-decided-decision-communication, and that can be done in an email, which people can read in due course, as scheduled.

People who got to a lot of meetings don’t write

Fact. If you have more than one meeting a week, you are not writing, or not writing as much as you should. I don’t mean students here, they have their allotted hours already for personal tutee meetings, and naturally you meet them in the classroom. I mean staff / University / research / stakeholder / funder meetings. All the meetings that do not involve students. People who go to meetings feel busy: they are busy, attending meetings. Any lingering guilt about not writing is assuaged by that ping of the calendar announcing yet another meeting to go to. You can fill your whole week with teaching and meetings. Boy you feel super useful, and perhaps, a little bit important.

How many meetings are too many? This depends on where you are in the pecking order. If you are running the department, this advice does not apply to you. You should probably be in a fair number of meetings - this is literally what you get paid to do, having given over most other parts of the job. Otherwise, it totally applies.

I feel any meetings are too many, naturally, but maybe you can’t get away with that. One per week: too many. Two per month? Acceptable, better for it to be two per term. Perhaps we have service roles and other faculty commitments, but if you have so many of these you ned to attend more than two meetings per month, you have too many roles, or it time to understand you can’t be at all of the meetings, all of the time. Share them out. Decide if you need to go to endless meetings to fulfil your roles or do your part. What are you actually doing there? What about PhDs? Well no-one needs to spend more than 30 minutes a week with their PhD student in general - are you feeding back on their work every week - otherwise, why are you meeting them? Again, this is not an opportunity to whine - this is not what PhD meetings are for. If you want to catch up - get many in a room and do it all at once. For 1-1 deep supervisory meetings, these should happen once a month, once every six weeks, when the student has had an opportunity to do some work and turn it in for comments.

And if you chair meetings, please have an agenda - a short one - with 3 things on it, and move through it like a hot knife through butter. Spare everyone the unnecessary pain. In my previous life I was Chair of the Postgrad Exam Boards and for boring reasons there were four of these suckers per year. FOUR. But I got them done in 30 sweet minutes, and it was glorious for everyone. This required some prep on my part obviously to check for any error in the papers, grades and so I was not faffing in the meeting. Not a problem, happy to do it. As chair is was my responsibility to fully prepare, and not waste other people’s time.

What about those meetings that ‘just pop up’? Well they don’t, not for you, because you already scheduled writing in that slot. If you had a class scheduled in that slot, there would be zero qualms about saying you could not make it. Same goes for research. It is not disposable at the whim of others. People who hold meetings that just ‘pop up’ (a) don’t write (b) are trying to dump some unexpected work on someone, and it can’t be you if you don’t go to the meeting (c) have badly thought through their time and you should not pay the price for that.

Remember, there are other ways to communicate with colleagues. Whilst meetings are seductive, they are also the number one indicator of someone who does not write. Shorter is better. Time is precious. And always, always write first.