Research consistently finds that people are in too many meetings that don’t move things forward and make it harder to get the rest of their work done.
One recent survey concluded that meetings are ineffective 72% of the time, and earlier research found that executives average nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, compared to under 10 hours in the 1960s.
Fixing meetings is arguably the most low-lying opportunity for most organizations to improve performance and worker engagement.
For helpful reminders of what individuals can do now to improve meetings, I spoke with Laura Mae Martin, Google’s executive productivity advisor and author of a new personal productivity book called Uptime. Here’s a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity:
Research suggests that people have more meetings than ever and the quality of the meetings is generally declining. How can we fix that?
There are two parts of it—and one is the people who run meetings. When you have a meeting that you run, take responsibility for making sure it's an excellent use of time for everyone involved. Get really intentional about what the purpose of the meeting is, communicate that so all attendees are aware of exactly what's going to happen, be diligent about pre-work and then expect people to have completed it, keep people on time. Presenters raise the credibility of the meeting if it's recurring by shortening it.
The people who are running meetings, that's the first responsibility: really looking at each meeting that you're holding and then doing what I call 'the Goldilocks survey' once a quarter. Is it too long, too short? Just constantly get that feedback. People settle into a meeting cadence. Or you have one idea and you add 30 minutes on the calendar—we really need to be thinking each time, how long will this take to talk about and how should I almost write that check for my time, that specific amount?
The other piece of it is attendees—which is a harder concept for people when you feel like you're just attending meetings as an attendee—how can you really make a difference? I give some strategies in the book for being that person who offers to help develop the agenda, offers to help keep the meeting on time, who asks the question, 'I just wanted to see what we're talking about tomorrow to see if I need to be there or if I should send a delegate.'
It's not just the person running the meeting. It starts there, but it's also making sure that you're getting the best use of your time. Is your manager ever going to be mad that you're using the company's time wisely and saying, 'I actually have a project that it would be great to have an hour to work on, so I'm going to do that tradeoff'? The two pieces are examining how we schedule and run meetings as individuals and then how we attend them.
How would you summarize the quickest actions to make a meeting better?
The first is asking, do you need a meeting? That's where the purpose, agenda, result comes in. If you don't have those three things defined, then maybe circle back or start by email. I'm a big start over email person. 'Can I get time with you? Let's start over email and see if we need the meeting.' If you identify it as an information-sharing meeting only, that's a really good gut check to ask why that can't be done over email. For things like decision-making, brainstorming, even connection it's more important to have an in-person meeting so just by defining it can be helpful. Then set the agenda ahead of time, not just to be diligent but because there's a lot of research around types of people in the way that they think. Introverts reflect later on about things that they've thought about. Whereas if you just announced what you want to talk about at the beginning of the meeting, you're only basically getting 50% of the ideas. So having that rigor around agendas and keeping time and results and follow up is that last piece. That's to raise the respect of the meeting and have people say, 'I always know that the action items in this meeting are going to come to fruition and I'm going to be asked about it at the next meeting if I don't get it done or there's going to be some circle back.' Those are really the ways to raise the credibility of meetings. I have a 'no agenda, I'm not attending' rule. I am not against meetings in any way. It's just about really making them a good use of time.
A lot of what you're saying seems to come down to preparing for meetings. Are there any tricks for doing that, given that a lot of people wake up at the start of a meeting and realize they're running it or are in meetings all the time so they don't have time to prepare for the meetings two days from now? Are there any tricks to increase the odds of doing what you're saying?
Like you said, when you're kind of just tumbling through your eight back-to-back meeting schedule, these things kind of sound good. This now zooms out into a bigger time management question, which is when I'm invited to a meeting, before I accept it, I go ahead and block the time that I would need to prepare and follow up from it. It's not just that 30 minutes, it's that I know after that I'm going to need to do a bunch of email followup from the meeting, so I'm going to block the 30 minutes after. If I need to prep for something in that meeting, I'm now blocking that time a week before. In general, I try to under commit, keeping an 80% commitment level so that I always have that breathing room versus tumbling into meetings.
But it is, like you said, thinking about it ahead of time. Bigger picture, I talk about making a daily plan for your following day the night before, so that you're doing that mental dress rehearsal of how that day will go. A lot of times that can end up being, 'You know what? I just talked to this person in the hall. We actually don't need this meeting.' Or, 'Look, there are two meetings with the same group of people. Can we combine that and just extend it 10 minutes?' Have that eagle eye the day before about your schedule. I'm notorious for always making it my own rule that if I'm hosting a meeting, I owe the attendees an agenda two days before because that's enough time for them to think, send a delegate, opt out, bring materials prepared, things like that. The more you're thinking about it ahead of time, the more you're getting out of the meeting.
There's research from Gallup and elsewhere that suggests that weekly check-in meetings between a manager and someone who's reporting to them are critical for engagement and achieving various individual and business results. Do you have any advice for how to make such one-on-one meetings better?
People approach one-on-ones in different ways and it's really a personalized approach. With a one-on-one check-in with any person, especially if it's your manager, my biggest advice is to make that meeting 'meetingful.' What happens is a lot of people feel the need to communicate constantly about things that could wait until the meeting over email, over chat, or stopping the person in the hall. It lowers the quality of that check-in because it now just becomes a time versus the place where you're really going to dive into issues with that person. If you have those standing meetings, I recommend making them your go-to place unless something cannot wait until that time to really up the value of them and then to leave room for anything unstructured.
In that situation with a manager and a reportee, you don't just want it to be, 'This is what I'm working on, this is what you're working on.' Maybe always leave the last 10 minutes for a brainstorm or connection. Even in that situation, I find that agenda setting helps. Because if you're hoping to go into a career chat in this weekly one-on-one and your manager doesn't know that and you spring that on them at the beginning of the meeting, they're in a totally different energy place than if you say, 'Let's use this to talk about this,' or 'Let's use this weekly one-on-one to make a decision on this.' Even though it's a check-in, sometimes people let that mean that it doesn't need to have an agenda because it's a check-in. But as you saw in my book, my team knew that I wouldn't attend even a social meeting without an agenda. We had a share a recipe session during the pandemic and there was still an agenda because it still gives that mental clarity of what's to be expected.
In Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg writes about a study where researchers found that with a group of bankers who were going into meetings and just fighting with each other, if they asked them to for 30 seconds ahead of the meeting to think about one desired outcome and write a single sentence down the contentiousness and the outcomes and the quality of the meeting changed dramatically. That aligns with what you were saying about forethought....
That's even just five seconds before. Can you imagine if they said the night before? It's so much just about intention and even saying, 'This is a brainstorm meeting, not a decision-making meeting.' It gives people context that they're not going to walk away with a decision or somebody who's missing the meeting isn't going to miss a decision. Just putting those labels on what are we actually doing with this time is so important.
There are practices at places like Amazon where you have to come in with a memo that then everyone takes a few minutes and reads and then the discussion kicks off. At other organizations, there's a culture where every meeting needs a PowerPoint deck. Do you have any recommendations in terms of the materials that are most effective at driving quality discussions and decisions during meetings?
One thing I've seen work well for leaders—especially with meetings where they're looking for weigh in from a senior leader or a product review to flush out a decision—is having a template that says, this is how exactly we want to approach a product review every time. 'We want to see this, we want to see what we're deciding between, we want to see what you think the decision would be, and then we want to see what you need from me.' Just have some sort of structure, even if it's not the same for every meeting. I've seen people have a Google Form for meetings and say, 'Before the meeting, make sure you have this filled out.' Or, if you have pre-work, instead of just saying 'Read this,' say, 'Make sure you add a comment at the end that indicates that you read it and any changes that you want to see.'
Having that structure is helpfu. People like structure. People want to know, 'This is how this person wants to be communicated with,' and that can go bigger than just meetings. Some executives have a 'How to work with me' doc or a user manual. A lot of those at Google have specifics about how that person likes to be met with and how they like to have pre-work done and what type of meetings they like. They're very prescriptive ways of telling people how to meet with me because it's not always the same. It's really more about setting the structure up front than any specific structure.
Microsoft research indicates that people are multitasking during meetings, doing emails and other things. Do you recommend any practices around that?
I would love to see that study. I know the study that I talk about in the book is kind of the opposite, where the higher the quality of meetings, the more it's related to job satisfaction. Meetings are such a big part of whether people say they're satisfied with their job.
It comes down to intention. I do what I call 'one tab working.' When I joined this call with you, I acted like we were in a room together and I minimized every other tab. I have an automatic schedule set up on my Google Chat where chats are muted when I'm in meetings so I don't see them. Close email. If I'm in meetings where I really want to be focused, I put my phone across the room.
I always talk about almost boring yourself into focus, childproofing yourself. To your point, I don't know if it's because they're noticing that their quality of meetings is lower, but they're noticing, 'I actually can't multitask. I'm thinking that I'm doing this well and I'm actually not getting a lot out of the meeting and not answering my email well either.' I've heard a lot of people say, 'What I do now is I just open the standalone Google Meet application on my desktop, and that's where I'm focused unless I need to do email or something like that.'
You said you call meetings 'meetingful'?
Yes. Meetingful because that's my way of saying increase the quality of them, make them meaningful, funnel communication there. I'm known for if I have a meeting with someone set for next Tuesday and they email me today about something that can wait and I say, 'Thanks, let's talk about it on Tuesday.' I funnel all of the meaningful communication because then I feel like that person's going to show up anticipating that that's going to be a really productive meeting and take it seriously, versus chipping away at the agenda all week, which doesn't really organize all your attention anyway because you're doing little drips.
Many people now use AI transcription tools. Do you have any recommendations there?
I just started using the Gemini 'take notes for me' feature, which is awesome. I'm not a big 'assign a note taker' person because, unless they're truly an administrative professional, can they pay attention to the meeting and be taking notes? It's helpful to take bullets for someone, but no one can really get all of the specifics. That enables people to feel like they can opt out and still get the information afterwards if it's something that they can scan. I also really love all of the in-the-weeds features of Google Meet to run better meetings. There are polls, breakout rooms—I use that one a lot. The Q&A feature I use at least twice a week, with people asking questions and the presenter able to see them.
The good and the bad of the pandemic is that a lot of the virtual meeting tools really took off because they were necessary. It's interesting reconciling some of the things people really like about virtual meetings, like hand raising and everyone being one box and we're all even, versus the boardroom. Now if you're in an in-person meeting, where there's a conference room of people, but a few people are virtual and we're all using a chat to ask questions, the conference room people don't want to be left out. So there's something like companion mode in Google Meet where you're able to basically join just the chat piece from your laptop. It just seamlessly makes the virtual hybrid, with some people in a room, some people virtual. It took a while to reconcile all that, but it has really come together.
Another feature that I love is time Insights in Google Calendar. It's the data about exactly how you're spending your time. I tell people if you feel like you're in a lot of meetings, get the data around it. Then actually what I do is I ask them, 'What percentage of time should you be in meetings?' Because, when it comes down to it, some executives will tell me, 'You know what? My job is just to meet, so that it really should be like 80% of my time.' Or some people say, 'I really need to spend some time coding, so I really should only be in meetings 50% of my time.' I usually ask, 'What's your goal? Let's go in, let's look at it.'
You can pick any date range and see what day of the week am I in meetings most often? How does that align with my hybrid schedule? Are the meetings typically one-on-one or three or more? Then you can get super granular. I help people get set up to color code their meetings and then get color data to analyze their priorities, or whether meetings are internal or external. What percentage of my meetings are external and internal? The data don't lie, your calendar doesn't lie. If you say, these are my priorities, does your calendar reflect that? Do your meetings reflect that? Having that data instantly available for any time range is just a game changer. That was one of my biggest projects with the product team.
Going back to AI, the nature of meetings changes because you're able to ask questions of the transcript of the meeting, you're able to do some emotional and language analysis. You're able in the meeting to see the amount of time people have spoken, some AI tools will let you ask, 'What are the takeaways? What are the points of greatest disagreement?' So some experts are talking about meetings becoming 'knowledge objects' as opposed to just time we spend together talking about stuff. Do you agree with that shift? If yes, and what are the consequences of that?
We're just starting to see how that all plays out. Like you said, is AI going to attend meetings for me? Is AI going to assign action items and is that efficient or does it then lower the quality of the meeting because everyone's just sending AI on their behalf? More than ever, we need to define meetings and the goal of them, because AI of course plays off of what we're feeding it. If we're saying, 'Based on this transcript, what is the decision that was reached and how was it decided? Was it consensus? 'the more that we uplevel our understanding and intention of meetings, the more we'll get out of AI and how it is handling meetings. There are so many benefits, including the most amazing AI feature in meetings I've seen, which is language translation instantly.
I've seen videos of companies that are sourcing manufacturing in China and had to do these oversee meetings with translators, and now instant communication is happening. That is going to be a huge game changer as far as how meetings are upleveled. Everything with AI, we're still just figuring out how it's going to change. My personal experience so far is that it has only helped with meetings. For example, I couldn't attend a meeting, had a transcription, put it into AI and said, Can you give me the top three summaries or anytime they mention the name Laura?' Now I'm getting that, what would've taken me maybe 15 minutes to read through the whole meeting and see things, it's summarizing it for me. The possibilities are endless. I think we're just seeing where it'll go.
Anything that makes us rethink meetings and redefine them is good because we tend to get in what I call the 'subscription' model. How many streaming services am I signed up for? How many meetings? It's good to take the objective view sometimes and just say, 'Let me look at everything I'm going to, let me look at everything I'm involved in. Is it all necessary? Are all these people still relevant? If I got this meeting invite today, would I accept it?' I call that zero-based calendaring, same as zero-based accounting.
My perception is that over some period of time, the quality of email communications has really degraded in terms of other people's responsiveness and also in terms of the mental tax of emails in your inbox. What would you advise to improve the quality of your email experience?
The first piece would be defining where you want people to communicate with you because the pressure is going to bubble somewhere. For a lot of people who don't lead people somewhere, it ends up being, 'Well, I didn't hear from you in an email, so I sent you another email, or I added time to your calendar, you didn't respond to my email, so then I chatted you.' Pick your one medium of communication and directing people there and invest heavily there. It's fine to ignore your email if you're totally on top of your chat and your calendar. Think about just where you want to be communicated with. Then when I work with an executive on email, I go through the step of removing everything you don't need to see. Even just search the word 'unsubscribe' in your inbox.
Anything that wasn't sent directly to you will have the word 'unsubscribe' in it. Get that view. Every single email that comes in your inbox, whether you open it or not, is using a piece of your mental energy. Get that stuff out as much as possible. That could be all you do, and you still feel lightness as far as your inbox. Step two is popping the things that you do need to see, which is really important for people who travel, are on their mobile, are in a lot of meetings. If the CEO of your company emails you directly, that should look different than the CEO emailing the whole company, and you should open it faster. Have things like a VIP label, have things like the aliases that you're on that are most important. Those things should pop out using a label and a filter.
If you only did those two things, now you've moved out some garbage, you've popped the things you care about, those two things could really save you. The last piece is what I call treating email like laundry. Your dryer is your inbox, and you would not take out one single shirt and fold it, go all the way up, take out a sock, throw it back in, even though it's a little wet, mark as unread. You would take it as right now I'm pulling things out, then I'm sorting them, then I'm folding them. Same thing with your email. I'm taking everything in the morning. I'm putting it in baskets based on what future me needs to do with it: read, review, respond. Then take the time to read, read, read, read, read when you have that energy just like you fold, fold, fold, fold, fold real quick before you go to bed.
Even if I tell people that's for the extremists who really want that full control of their inbox and it's crazy, people who take my training on that method will say things like, 'I feel so much better,' or, 'I'm lighter,' or, 'My mental clutter is gone.' It's so funny because it's a Gmail training, but email is so personal, so in our face. It's the first thing a lot of people see when they wake up, the last thing before they go to bed. That's what I call the gateway to productivity. If you can get that under control, you feel, 'Okay, I can do this. I'm on top of my email, anything's possible. Now I'm more on top of my time.' If you can't tell, I'm passionate about emails.
You said in the book that executives spend something like 23 hours a week in meetings. On average, how many hours a week do you think you spend in meetings?
That was a general stat, that's not a Google specific stat. The last month, my daily average was four and a half hours per day. That's where I would guess I was. That's where I want to be because some of my job is writing, some of my job is doing a newsletter. Apparently I meet the most on Wednesdays and most of my meetings are three or more guests. That's because I'm very aggressive when a one-on-one is proposed about protecting my time. Why can't this start as an email?
