Too many meetings leaving no time to actually get work done?

[teddyeddie]

Does anyone else have a ridiculous number of meetings in their job which stops them actually doing any work and meeting deadlines?

For example, the last few days I have had back to back meetings 9-5 and a 15 minute lunch!! I work 10 hour days over 4 days. I’m not even getting a decent break.

It’s just meeting after meeting - most organised by our line manager who is obsessed with meetings (that could be just an email ).

NHS.

Yes! Also public sector but criminal justice. I've started sending apologies to the meetings that are not important or those which seem to be meetings about meetings and achieve nothing

I’m also being double booked a lot - maybe I should clone myself!

I had a bit of a go at the line manager today about it - see if he takes the hint!!

Also, the agendas for a lot of these meetings have exactly the same information on them. We are repeating the same thing over and over again!

No, we don’t do meetings. When would the work get done? We only have a one-to-one catch-up with our manager once a month. Plus, an all-staff meeting every three months.

Yes, that’s what it should be like.

We are all struggling to get work done. He will task us with something to do by the next day at 9am then have us in a meeting, of some sort, for the rest of the day!

Start politely declining some of them. And when there are those with a good reason to attend, make sure they start on time. Insist, no more 'give it a couple of minutes' for latecomers- online meetings can be recorded.

I have a dual role in the NHS so I have double to the rest of my grade. I also have external meetings on top. But, the majority of internal meetings are just taking up too much time. My last job wasn’t like this - we had one monthly meeting!

I actually brought my friend who works for the nhs and has said similar a coaster with “I’ve just had another meeting that couldn’t have been an email” on it 🤣

I think you need to block out your calender for a lunch break so he can’t put meetings over that x amount of time a day.

Then as long as you aren’t expected to work overtime to action the meetings or pulled up for doing nothing else I’d just sit and enjoy listening!

I have started booking time in my calendar to actually get work done and then I protect that time fiercely, otherwise people will just fill my day with meetings.

Maybe start blocking out your calender with the title “actioning X for deadline y”.

My boss is shared into my calender and will sometimes ask me if it’s possible to rearrange something but also respects if I can’t (because I always do if I can)

We have access to each other’s calendar. It’s just an obsession with meeting after meeting. Most of it doesn’t even apply to me either so Im
sat there unable to crack on with what I’m meant to be doing.

Some people, and your manager appears to be one of them, like to spend the whole time in meetings, and seem to view the meetings as their actual job. The only thing they get done is to chat away in meetings deciding whether or not to have another meeting about what someone else needs to do, or didn't do, or should have done, or could have got done in time if only they'd not spent so long in meetings. Then someone circulates the minutes of the meeting, so they spend time reading about a meeting they already had, in preparation for the meeting to come so they can talk about whether or not to have another meeting all over again. And repeat ad infinitum until it's time to retire.

Meanwhile, no actual work gets done by anyone.

Agree and i was once made to organise a meeting for the sole purpose of organising a meeting

Manage your diary - block out a hour as focus time daily ; block out time to work on specific tasks and label them as such; block out lunch. Show these times as busy/unavailable.
Review and accept or decline meetings as you see fit. If people want your input as opposed to your presence they will track you down.

Block out lunch , insist on seeing an agenda and only attending the relevant sections of long meetings , can you send a deputy who will brief you after the meeting - good development opportunity for a junior member of team

It’s got so much worse since hybrid working became
the norm IME. All my team and clients are remote so we have way more meetings just to schedule talking each other than if we were sitting at desks next to each other in the office.

Even if you block out time, or you have another meeting booked in, they still send a meeting request and expect you to move whatever was blocking it in the first place (which results in even more wasted time reorganising other meetings).

This is ideal. Tell both meetings you are at the other one and can they send you a summary of actions, then just get on with your work.

I wonder if this is why the country is in a mess? Too many meetings and not enough work being done.

No offence to you op.

delegate / delete / delay
it’s the only way to deal with it

Another thing that bothers me is that I’m expected to take the minutes for a lot of these meetings. I’m not a bloody secretary! Also, if he wants to see something on a Teams call he will ask me to share my screen and find it for him!! I feel like his slave!

It’s not that simple. The other manager shares a room with me and if I say I can’t go to a meeting he will come over and check my calendar and make me cancel (an important meeting) it to attend their 20th meeting in a row about the same bloody thing. This is NHS! We don’t have time for this!

Honestly I would review your last quarter. Add in how many hours of your weeks have been taken up by meetings.

Then add hours with no meetings convert to percentage and also add how much lunch time you have missed in a quarter.

Draft an email with all of your current outstanding work streams/items and tell him you need an agreed frame work for the next quarter to complete.

Calculate how many hours you estimate you need to complete.

And propose to ensure the next quarter is more efficient and you have the ability to actually complete your tasks you will now be managing your calendar by blocking work time and that you will no longer be in a position to attend meetings that are not relevant to your own work streams.

Also suggest that minutes are fairly rotated.

Close out the email by stating if this isnt agreeable that you await his instructions on what to prioritise going forward.

The shock of it in black and white may actually make him not be an inefficient micro managing idiot.

And also propose meetings move from 30 to 25 minutes and 60 to 55 as it is not sustainable to run back to back meetings.

My diary is like this. The worst is when it’s a series of 30min meetings in a row. The most meetings that I’ve had in a day is 15 I think. I don’t really know why my diary is substantially worse than that of my peers even though it’s something the team comment on all the time. I am already quite ruthless with what I do and don’t join and delegate where I can but I just seem to attract meetings.