How Engineers Can Make Meetings More Productive

“Meetings are a symptom of bad oranization. The fewer meetings, the better.”

— Peter Drucker, management legend

Engineers want to engineer. They don’t want to be stuck in meetings.

Some meetings are necessary. Unfortunately, these are the minority of meetings held.

Below are three practical ways engineers can stop meetings from eating up their week—and still look like team players, not rebels.

Demand a Purpose and an Outcome

Before agreeing to attend a meeting, ask: What decision are we making? What will be different after this meeting?

If you can’t answer these questions, don’t attend. We all have 24 hours allotted in a day. If you choose to attend an ill-defined meeting, you are deciding not to perform another task that is probably a much better use of your time.

Of course, everyone has a boss. The boss might want you to attend a meeting whose objective is at best fuzzy. Try to convince your boss that it is a much better use of your time to skip the meeting and complete a specific task instead.

If there’s no clear meeting objective, suggest handling it by email or a shared doc. Unless there is a pressing decision, the meeting agenda can be managed more efficiently and effectively by using collaborative tools like Slack.

When you do attend, steer the group back to outcomes: “So are we deciding X today?” Your fellow attendees will thank you.

If you are in a meeting and wondering what the objective is, you can bet your life that other attendees are wondering the same thing.

Engineers thrive on defined problems; meetings should be no different. Attendees welcome a meeting with a clear agenda that the meeting leader follows. However, if you do not add anything unique to the meeting, you probably should not attend.

Have you ever heard the term “straphanger?” These are people who feel they have to attend every meeting to “be in the know.”

If you are the meeting leader, you need to invite only people who can contribute to the meeting. At the start of the meeting, politely ask if anyone has not received an invitation; they should leave at this time.

Clear goals cut rambling and turn talk into action. If you are the meeting leader, next to the agenda items, add three columns: Decision, Information, and Discussion. Put an “X” in the column appropriate to the agenda item.

If the agenda item requires a decision, ensure this happens quickly and does not devolve into a discussion.

If the agenda item is only for information, do so and squelch any discussion.

If the agenda item requires discussion, set a strict time limit.

One way engineers can make meetings more productive is to demand a purpose and an outcome.

Another is to batch meetings adjacent.

Batch Meetings Adjacent

Batch meetings into blocks and keep the rest of the day sacred for deep work.

Constantly being interrupted for meetings while you are working on a project is inefficient. As you work longer, you become more efficient. When you are interrupted by meetings, your train of thought is broken.

When you get back to work, you have to reestablish your train of thought. If you had kept working instead of attending the meeting, you would have accomplished much more.

Propose 25- or 50-minute meetings instead of the default hours, and volunteer to serve as the timekeeper. There will be people in the meeting who want to keep discussing a subject without regard to time. It must be made clear to everyone that discussion is not open-ended.

Use and enforce the method of dividing the agenda into decision, information, and discussion sections mentioned in the previous section. This is the best way to meet objectives while respecting attendee discussion.

Research shows engineers need long, uninterrupted stretches to think, design, and debug. Guarding that time isn’t selfish—it’s how real progress happens.

Accomplishing engineering work should trump all considerations of meetings.

The rule should always consider alternative ways to make progress before a meeting is considered. The advent of collaborative software has dramatically enhanced the ability to stay connected without meetings.

Two ways engineers can make meetings more productive are to demand a purpose and an outcome and batch meetings adjacently.

A third way is to only be in the room if you add unique value.

Only Be In the Room If You Add Unique Value

If you’re at a meeting “just in case,” you’re probably wasting time that could be spent on more productive work.

When you are deeply engrossed in your work, you may lose all track of time. This is human and one of the greatest gifts because you “get into a groove,” which makes you more productive.

However, none of us has infinite time, which makes time wasted so hideous. You may wonder if you “don’t have time” to complete a task.

If you review your history of performing the task, you will see that unnecessary attendance at meetings has cost you time.

Throughout your career, you were undoubtedly asked by your boss to attend specific meetings. If it were clear to your boss that specific meetings are unnecessary and stealing time away from productive work, your boss would want you to spend your time productively rather than sitting in a meeting.

However, there may be times your input is required at a meeting. Offer to send a brief written summary instead.

When you are needed at a specific meeting, come with data, options, and a recommendation so your presence actually “moves the needle.”

Three ways engineers can make meetings more productive are to (1) demand a purpose and an outcome, (2) batch meetings adjacently, and (3) only be in the room if you add unique value.

Engineers hate meetings where their input is not needed. The time in these meetings can be used for productive work.

Learn to politely push back on meetings if there is no reason for you to attend.

Call to Action

• Before agreeing to attend a specific meeting, make sure it has a purpose, agenda, and outcome

• Batch meetings into blocks and keep the rest of the day sacred for deep work.

• Only attend meetings in which you add unique value.

“The best way to reduce meetings is to make them effective.”

— Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting
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References

• Newport, C. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

• Brooks, F. The Mythical Man-Month. Addison-Wesley, 1975.

• Rogelberg, S. The Surprising Science of Meetings. Oxford University Press, 2019.

• Harvard Business Review, “Stop the Meeting Madness,” Perlow, Hadley & Eun, 2017.

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