You Can Stop Back-to-Back Meeting Culture

I’ve got very good news – you do not have to suffer through meeting after meeting with no room to breathe, eat, or pee.

In more good news, for those of you following along on my “learn how to write these weekly essays saga” week 10 of 52:

- Today, I only hit snooze once!

- My small detour was grabbing scissors to do quick alterations – my tshirt collar felt suffocating.

- I lit one candle. Made one cup of tea. And positioned myself by the same window as last week.

- I pulled up Petit Biscuit’s new EP “Honor Your Goals” on Spotify and hit play.

Making progress! Onto meetings.

You likely remember the headlines, or even the feeling in your bones, that during COVID, one of the things that became ubiquitous quickly (for those of us non-essential workers that had the privilege to work from home) was that our days turned into back-to-back Zooms.

Unlike in the office days, we discovered there was no need for “travel time” between meetings. We were not stopping by to visit with one another. And we weren’t waiting in line for the bathroom.

I believe part of staying busy and making ourselves even busier was that we were in crisis. COVID killed over 1 million people in the U.S. alone. It was fucking scary. Some of us were self-soothing, dealing with some of the stress of not knowing what’s going on or what was to come by filling our workdays and our work calendars to the point of overflowing.

The visual of my digital Google Calendar kind of reminds me of playing Tetris on our family computer in the 90s. You keep hitting the space bar with your thumbs, changing the shape and direction until you’re ready to use the arrow keys and slot your selection into place.

I can go back to 2020 and 2021 now and see that the little digital blocks of my calendar were shapes on top of shapes on top of shapes. Space felt sacrilegious. Like if there was space I was slacking off, or not being efficient, or not showing my value through my to-do list. Back then, understandably, if I saw space I’d fill it - with a task, a meeting, a goal for what I might accomplish even in just 15 minutes.

But here’s the truth: back-to-back meetings are so stupid.

There are diminishing returns almost immediately.

When you have no room to breathe or think or organize your notes or schedule tasks based on the conversation that just happened, you limit your own ability to maximize and metabolize the meeting.

It loses value. Rather than appreciating your colleagues and their insight and the conversation you just had, you’re feeling stress, you’re now feeling behind, and you may even be feeling resentful that there is more to do with seemingly no time to do it.

I get it. Office workers get it. It’s critical that we recognize the context that we’re in – and we build our workdays and work cultures accordingly.

Good news, we can bring sense back to our work calendars, our work teams, and our work cultures.

A) It’s okay to remind yourself and your colleagues that we are, in fact, in bodies.

- People need to pee, pump, eat, and stretch their bodies. My chiropractor calls our sedentary sit-at-our-computers postures the new smoking – saying, if we do not get up and move and stretch and shift our gaze away from screens, we’re going to crumble in on ourselves. Our bodies were not designed to sit and be still for this long. We can keep fighting that or we can do what cultures around the globe do – take friggin breaks.

- At Team Dynamics, we instituted a 7-minute rule for internal meetings. If it was just us, no outside vendors or clients, there was a 7-minute grace period at the top of each meeting. More than 5, and less than 10. Why? Because people needed a breather to tend to things. And also, we could surely get through our agenda in 53 minutes.

B) There is nothing magical about clock time. Try the alternatives.

- Brain science does not say that our best problem-solving, innovation, or deep thinking happens neatly inside clock time increments.

- Use clock time when it makes sense. Be flexible with it when the context calls for something better.

o Ex. Are you doing “shallow work”? Work that you’ve done before? (ex. data entry)

Then you can reasonably estimate how long that will take. Shallow work is often repetitive and doesn’t require a ton of brain power – just enough to get the job done.

o Ex. Are you doing “deep work”? Deep work requires concentration, complex problem-solving, or other creative energy. Make space on your calendar to do deep work well.

Is it including other people? Depending on the number of colleagues, consider how much time will truly be needed for everyone to weigh in and share their good ideas.

- Viable alternatives to a clock time obsession include relational and event time. In Tema Okun’s work about the characteristics of white supremacy culture, an obsession with “urgency” as

well as “quanity over quality” collude to make back-to-back meetings seem logical, even when they are not.

Relational and event time orientations are often norms to people part of the non-dominant culture in the U.S., think BIPOC folks, LGBTQ+ folks. These orientations center people and relationships over tasks and so-called “productivity.” With these orientations to time, you can create an environment that is most conducive to the outcome.

For example, you could choose to block a half day for important budget planning work. Or you could schedule a brainstorming session over a meal where conversation may flow more freely and naturally. Get creative!

Relational or event time can mean you are ultimately more efficient, and you wrap up even before your scheduled end time.

For example, I love when at minute 17 we’ve accomplished what we came to this meeting to do so we wrap, and give one another the 13 remaining minutes back.

Relational or event time can also result in you finishing collective work differently, not requiring never ending group emails or tons of short spread out meetings. With this orientation, you may be able to dig in and actually get something done rather than have the tasks linger for weeks or months.

C) Decide to build in margin.

- Do this on purpose. It’s a choice. And it’s often a counter-cultural one in a U.S. where “busy” gets conflated with “being impactful.”

And for the love of God, do not apologize for being thoughtful about margin – there’s no need. Meaning, no “I’m sorry, I just need a few minutes.” There’s nothing to be sorry about. You’re grown. Map out the time you need. Be excellent and a contributory member of your team when you’re together. Model that spaciousness has value. Show what it can be like to focus and plan when you’re not scrambling and running late all day long.

Start with just 15 minutes between scheduled time with colleagues. Is that enough? Do you need more? Does the margin you need depend on the preparation and decompression of particular conversations – probably. Start with consistent 15-minute margins, see what you notice, and go from there.

D) Practice de-centering yourself.

- Some people you work with:

o Need breaks to pray

o Need breaks to pump

o Need breaks to deal with having their period

o Need breaks to check in with elders and/or young people they are caring for

o Need breaks to change clothes because they are in the middle of menopause and have sweat through their first outfit

o Need breaks to tend to chronic pain or fatigue

o Need breaks to play and be silly and fill back up so they can dig back in

You may or may not have a particular need. That’s cool. Just remember that your colleagues are whole people with whole lives, some of which you know about and some of which you don’t.

Inside of a capitalist economy most of us have been conditioned to show our employers that we are invincible, have no needs, and can go-go-go. Computers can do that. Humans can’t. We have unique value to our workplaces; in order to actualize that value, we have to take consistent care of ourselves.

An important call out – women continue to bear the brunt of both work and home responsibilities. From grocery shopping to house cleaning to kid pick up and elder care, women, particularly women of color have enormous people and community responsibilities. So don’t waste our time in useless meetings please. We have plenty of other shit to do.

E) Not everything needs to be a meeting.

- If you are questioning whether a get together needs to happen live or if some other modality could work – try it. An email. A Slack message. A 1-on-1 rather than a group.

- Many workplaces have fallen into the habit of near constant meetings without stopping to re-evaluate whether or not we need this meeting, with these participants, for this length of time. Revisit and revise when and how you make meetings. Be smart. Don’t make or consent to meetings just because you’re on auto-pilot.

If you’d like support around this or any of the other topics I’ve shared in my essays, I’ve got space in my coaching practice this spring and would love to have your back. Feel free to reach out!

My commitment to you, is that next week I will share Essay #11 out of 52 about cameras on or off.

Yours,