An aggressively disrespectful use of time

The true cost of pointless meetings

Back in 2012, I found myself sitting in a large conference room with about 25 of my peers for a 2 hour long, utterly pointless, status review meeting. These meetings were bi-weekly, of course, and had been ongoing for about two months. As an engineer who grew up in big-company culture, I’d grown a thick skin about these sorts of abuses and also a well-developed understanding of the mathematics of my predicament:

First equation, the Law of Meeting Gravity. The number of meeting attendees grows exponentially with the length of the meeting. Organizers naturally feel the need to justify long meetings by packing the agenda with topics. More topics to cover means more presenters are needed for the discussion. Of course, for each presenter, additional listeners are needed. If a meeting gets very very long its gravity grows so much that light can no longer escape, this is what we call an “offsite.”

Second equation, the Law of Meeting Productivity. The chance of a meeting being useful decreases exponentially with each additional attendee. Thus, a 25-person meeting is less an exercise in productivity and more an exercise in showmanship or endurance depending on your role.

This meeting was particularly bad, not just because it was mathematically destined to be terrible, but because the VP running the show decided to experiment with novel form of corporate torment. For 30 minutes we sat in silence, laptops closed, cellphone quieted, reading paper print outs of the upcoming quarterly plan. Apparently, he’d read about this technique in some Harvard Business Review article praising Amazon’s efficient meeting culture. For the sanity of tech workers everywhere I hope that this idea never catches on and that HBR readership rapidly declines. Fortunately, the article also mentioned the need to collect feedback at the end of each meeting. With five minutes left on the clock our VP asked, “so was this a good, how is everyone feeling?” And I spoke up candidly.

“Frankly, I feel that this meeting was an aggressively disrespectful use of our time.”

Afterwards, a friend and mentor (his name was Kevin) said to me, “well that was an expensive meeting.” Expensive meeting? Never heard that phrase so I asked what he meant. Kevin told me that you could measure the value of any meeting by converting the salaries of the attendees to an hourly rate. And by extension, you could judge the usefulness of a meeting by whether the value to the company exceeded the cost of having the people in the room. The 2 hour, 25-person meeting we’d just attended clocked in at about $15k total and had resulted in no decisions being made. Total waste.

Now, this is a very cynical idea but it stuck with me for a long time afterwards. Not for the reasons you might think. What Kevin said was right, we managers (and yes, I’m singling out managers because we’re the most responsible for this particular type of corporate abuse) do have to be careful about wasting the company’s money. But the real tragedy, I’ve come to believe, is in wasting people’s time.

First, understand what I mean: Time is not just money. Time is opportunity. And time is yours. Every moment you sit in a conference room watching a PowerPoint presentation is a moment you might spend doing an infinite number of more fulling things. Every moment, every heartbeat, is an opportunity to work on a project, to learn something new, to enjoy your family and friends, to live.

Each of us, and I’m sorry to be so melodramatic about this, only has a limited amount of time — a limited number of heartbeats — to spend here on Earth. Managers get to decide how other people’s heartbeats are spent.

Think about it, just reading this article I’ve spent a few of yours. Do. You. Feel. Your. Heart. Beating. Now?

Sincere apologies for being so wasteful, but I’m trying to make a point. That 25-person meeting I mentioned before wasn’t only costing the company $15k, it cost the attendees a quarter million heartbeats that they simply won’t ever get back.

Nowadays, I’m running much larger teams and am responsible for how hundreds of people spend their time. I feel the weight of that. For any organization I build, it’s my personal hope to ensure that every employee’s time is well spent. That they each have an opportunity to work on projects that they are passionate about, have meaning, and are impactful.

If you’re a manager, I hope you’ll do the same. Think beyond cost efficiency, or productivity metrics, or OKRs. Aspire to spend every heartbeat you are responsible for purposefully.

Thank you for your time.

rock on
-nick

Appendix

1. What happened to the meeting after I spoke up? I am glad to say that this was the last instance of the recurring 25-person meeting. The practice of silently reading print outs, sadly, survives to this day.
2. I intentionally didn’t leave hints/tips for running efficient meetings. There are plenty of articles on that topic. But if you really need one: buy a nice watch.
3. Check out my career journey over at the /dev/color/ publication. Fantastic organization that is really moving the needle when it comes to advancing people of color in the tech industry.
4. Try calculating the cost of your next big pow-wow with this HBR calculator.