You cannot work together without consultation, but before you know it your agenda is full of meetings, catch ups and other catch-up moments. Sometimes you don’t even remember why you have those meetings. Don’t worry: psychologist Thijs Launspach knows how to have more useful meetings and have more time for your real work.
A board meeting. An evaluation interview. A ‘cup of coffee’, to ‘exchange’. A digital meeting, to ‘get everyone on the same page’. Consulting, talking – I could spend half my week in meetings if I wanted to. But when will I actually get around to working?
As a freelancer, I have to keep a close eye on my own time. Fortunately, I don’t have to listen to a boss telling me when to meet with whom. I do have to keep my clients satisfied. They sometimes have a knack for consulting often and a lot. Because they are a little unsure about what they want. Or because the whole team has to ‘take a piss over it’.
That is also the reason that you should never meet with too many: even the people who cannot add anything feel that they ‘have to contribute something’.
Clear purpose
By consulting in different formations for years, I learned a thing or two about meetings. Such as: a meeting should always have a purpose. It must be clear in advance what decisions need to be made or who needs to be informed about what. If the purpose is unclear, a meeting is mainly an opportunity to chat endlessly – and that is a waste of everyone’s time.
As much as I am in favor of expressing feelings in the workplace, a meeting is not a therapy session. Of course it is good to start with a round of ‘how are you really doing’ every now and then. However, a meeting is not the place to ensure everyone is seen, heard and acknowledged – there are other times for that.
Cut back time
A meeting almost always lasts too long. It always takes exactly the same amount of time as it takes you. If you plan an hour and a half, that’s a license to spend an hour and a half full of bullshit. Or longer, because everyone ‘is just comfortable in it’.
If you shorten the meeting to half an hour, it will also last half an hour. It forces effectiveness. If necessary, you can always book additional time – in practice, that never actually happens.
There is no such thing as meetings that are too short. The best meeting is one that is canceled because it can be resolved differently. That’s the last thing I learned: Few things kill your mood as much as sitting through a meeting that might as well have been an email.
Thijs Launspach is a psychologist and stress expert. He is the author of, among others, We are all just doing something (2024), You are already enough – Mentally healthy in a crazy world (2022) and Work can also be done (2020).
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