A meeting that ends without a decision

Colleagues and clients who respect your time deserve a different standing with you, and priority, always.

Working across several companies, projects and startups, one of the hardest things for me was sitting in a meeting full of talk with nothing at the centre of it. Scenarios, ambitions and assumptions with no connection to the thing we were actually building.

For a long time I assumed the problem was me, that I was losing focus and getting distracted. Over time I found something else: a large group of people like talking and do not like working. To them a meeting is time that can be taken from work, or time a founder can use to describe ambitions to a freelancer, however unrealistic those ambitions are.

Not everyone, obviously. But before asking for a meeting, you should know its purpose, whether the subject deserves a meeting at all, and whether there is a cheaper way to get the same information.

Eight rules

1. If you freelance, count meeting time as working hours. Your time is not free, and neither is your experience.

2. Use tools instead of meetings. Loom and similar tools are among the easiest ways to take a brief, gather requirements, or explain something.

3. Draw hard lines. Do not let anyone waste your time, and be strict about it.

4. Know your role before you walk in. The specific thing you are there to work on, not a vague heading.

5. Your rest is worth what your work is worth. Without a clear head and some stability, you will not produce anything.

6. Any meeting with more than four or five people rarely produces a clear outcome. Settle it with three or four at most. Keep the large meeting for announcing what you are doing, under 15 minutes, on the subject only.

7. The important one: finish your work. A meeting has to produce a decision. A meeting that produces no decision is a failed meeting.

8. Summarise it and send the summary. There are plenty of tools that do this for you now.

Fewer meetings, more work done.