What does your life look like these days? Open your diary now and look at what’s in it for next week. Meetings? A few? How many? And how many will get added next week. I am hoping that in the next few lines I will get you thinking (and maybe even make you sufficiently gloomy/fed up) about how you spend your time to want to do something about it – especially with regard to meetings and how you handle that whole bit of business life.

How bad is it?

The nice people at Doodle.com reckon admistrators/PAs spend at least 5 hours a week arranging and re-arranging meetings for us to go and sit it – an eighth of their working week. The New York Times, a little while back, reported that men in the U.S spend on average 4.3 hours a week in meetings whilst women spend 2.3 – half what men do. Maybe I should have hired a woman to write this article? The same paper also reported, at the time, that of the people surveyed, 75% said that their meetings could be more effective. At the time of going to press the report suggested that 91 million US workers spent between one and eight hours in meetings each week. Wait for it… 11% reported surviving an astonishing 13+ hours a week in meetings. Is that you too?

What is your meeting schedule telling you?

Get hold of a piece of paper right now, draw a big circle on it and in this order, very quickly plot the slices of the pie according to time spend – don’t dwell – do it quickly.

1. Meetings
2. Supervising and managing people
3. Communicating and winning support
4. Organising and documenting thoughts
5. Thinking

I’ll bet the ‘Thinking’ bit is squeezed in. Why don’t we think more? Perhaps because it looks like we’re not doing anything? Perhaps because we accept silly amounts of tasks? A web time management website I visited suggested that its clients should devote a full 5 minutes a day to planning. 5 minutes?! I am aghast. Tell me that you are too.

So, why go to a meeting at all?

I think that there are only two valid reasons for committing to a meeting: to get value or to give it. Here are all the others:

• To stay in the loop
• To keep control of something
• To manage perceptions (I am interested, involved, a leader, omnipresent, I am working hard, I belong… add your own)

Magic Pennies (or ‘how to handle a meeting request)

So, you get your meeting request/demand/threat. Do this before you reach for your PDA or smartphone. Print off the next page and get 5 coins out of your purse or pocket. If you are getting this Bulletin in text form just go to http://www.pec.org.uk and download the page there.

Now allocate your 5 coins with the appropriate weighting in each of the four unshaded boxes. Now count up the coins and there’s your decision.

• Play the game whenever you get invited to a meeting. Never play it for more than 10 seconds for each meeting. The real answer will come quickly – everything you do after that is probably false justification.
• Do not email a refusal – call or walk to the meeting owner’s desk – it’s still quicker than going to the meeting.
• DO NOT APOLOGISE. They will be confused about your motivations. Explain that you are happy to help but not to meet. Ask for the agenda and for what the person would like your brief input on.

Adding value without being there

You’ve refused the meeting. Well done. Now, assuming they’re still talking to you you need to do the following:

• Get the agenda
• Ask the meeting owner what their priorities are (you may already know this because you may have refused on the basis of a conversation with them – even better.

Now pretend you had intended to go to the meeting but got stuck in a snow drift/sand dune/ (stay with me on this) and your mobile phone only has enough power for a text or 60 seconds of talk (it’s an iPhone 3 with iPhone 4 software loaded). What would you say? To help you decide bear in mind that your input will stand the greatest chance of being used if your representative feels comfortable about sharing your it. So, whatever you transmit to them it should:

• Be absolutely pertinent
• Add your input with a genuinely positive intention and in genuinely positive wording
• Be brief
• Obviously benefit the other people at the meeting (and least of all you)

Conclusions

1. Go to the meeting for a good reason. 2. Stay away for a good reason. 3. Add value and no one will ever chase you one way or the other (well, not for long). Recognise that avoiding meetings is not being lazy – it’s actually harder than following the crowd because you can’t hide behind looking busy. By reducing the number of meetings you attend you are saying: Look at me, I’m not playing the game and I am still delivering value. You are saying: I refuse to waste my time. You are saying: Look at my output not at how much or little I had to work to produce it.

Good luck with swimming against the tide. Grease up and get going!