Focus and the meeting culture

Today I would like to talk about one of the biggest threats to focus and productivity in the free world: Meetings!

Don’t get me wrong, having a meeting is not a bad thing by definition. Working together is a great thing, so meetings could actually be fantastic. And sometimes they are, but very often they are disastrous to morale, focus and the general well-being of the employees.

Now why is that, and am I not exaggerating a bit? I believe that meetings are often bad because they disrupt the team’s focus in a severe way. Imagine a workday where we have two one-hour meetings scheduled for the team. Let’s assume the team members work 08:30 AM - 5 PM and go for lunch between noon and 1 PM. Also let’s assume that daily scrum is held 9:00 - 9:15 AM. Now, if the two meetings are scheduled to 10 - 11 AM and 2 - 3 PM, my experience is that most of the workday is wasted. The team doesn’t have time enough to enter a state of high-focus collaboration, except for maybe after the last meeting. In order to work effectively, my experience is that either the entire morning or the entire afternoon must be free of meetings.

I once listened to a TED talk where the speaker said that working and sleeping are similar in that you can’t get quality work or quality sleep if you’re interrupted all the time. As a father of two, I can relate to this. If your sleep is disturbed ten times during the night, you are destined be an unshaved sleepwalker at the office the next day. If you are a programmer and get interrupted all the time, you will never enter the zone of total focus. As a consequence, the quality of your work will be much lower.

The lack of great outcome from the team adds a lot of stress to its members. A stressed-out team will be even less productive. They will also start questioning the scrum ceremonies. The team will start feeling that retrospectives are time wasted. A vicious circle has been formed.

The only exception to this rule is when the meeting creates more value than what all the wasted focus time costs. And there are a few tricks you can use to minimize the negative impact of a meeting:

• Make it as short as possible. Try cutting the standard duration of your meetings in half - if you usually schedule one-hour meetings, try to cut them to 30 minutes! 
• Create a crisp agenda. Personally I am sick of all those two-hour meetings without an agenda you’re invited to. If you know the agenda well in advance, you will have the chance to prepare for the meeting. You will also have the chance of responding with an informed decline, as you will be able to assess whether your participation will actually create value. 
• Only invite a skeleton crew. The fewer that are disrupted from their work, the better. 
• Make the invitations optional to the highest degree possible. Don’t insist on attendance if it is not absolutely necessary! 
• Place the meetings in time so that the negative impact on focus is as small as possible. Right after daily scrum and lunch are great choices. 

It is always hard to practice what you preach, but I have been playing around a lot with cutting down meeting duration. I often separate room bookings from meeting bookings, so that a meeting can overshoot its alotted time if that is really needed. And if we are done after fifteen minutes at a thirty-minute meeting, we cut it short!

Last but not least, trying to change your organization's meeting culture too fast might turn into a conflict. In that case, I suggest meeting halfway!