Is Your Time Being “Virtually Eliminated”?

Remember the ancient days of pre-COVID? That blissful age before March of 2020 when the encroaching virus shut down our world. The days when most didn’t sit in our living rooms, at kitchen tables or alone in our offices, switching on the computer camera and gathering a team otherwise scattered around the globe for a “virtual meeting”.

Virtual meetings have their positives. I like being able to look people in the eye the way we couldn’t during a conference call. I like knowing that everyone is fully engaged in the meeting in a way we could not in those ancient days of voice-only calls. But virtual meetings have also altered the workday in ways that many don’t recognize.

Virtual meetings are detrimentally too easy to schedule. With the stroke of a mouse, we can summon anyone in our network — employees, customers, shareholders, executives and the like — to a virtual meeting. Space is immediately reserved on their calendar — as it is on ours when they do the same to us. Instantaneously, we and they are trapped into attending a virtual meeting so as not to offend the host by declining the invitation.

The result for many is that days and weeks are consumed by back-to-back get-togethers and workdays disappear in endless and contiguous meetings.

Time was there existed a vast amount of time between meeting commitments. In the not-so-old days, scheduling a meeting required contacting potential attendees, awaiting responses on availability, coordinating calendars and eventually scheduling the meeting. While this process was a hassle, the benefit was that we scheduled meetings — often in-person — for those issues or topics that actually necessitated one. Since meetings were more cumbersome to schedule, we had fewer of them and because we had fewer of them, we were left with vast windows throughout the day during which we could complete tons of real work. We had plenty of time to focus on administrative tasks, make phone calls, send emails, review reports, provide feedback to teammates, prepare customer quotations and perform other tasks.

No more. For those longing for the good old days — i.e., pre-2020 — a few antidotes:

First, use the minutes between virtual meetings to maximum advantage. When a meeting wraps up early, avoid the temptation to scroll social media, to addictively check a newsfeed or worse yet, play the mobile game on which you’re hooked this month. Instead, keep a to-do list and mark those items that will take less than 5 minutes to complete. Quick texts, emails or reports in need of review are great examples. Fill the brief time between meetings checking off these items. Four 15-minute gaps over the course of a day thus filled with administrative obligations can save an hour of catch-up at the end of the day.

Second, most 30-minute meetings don’t really require 30 minutes. Most 60-minute meetings don’t really require 60 minutes. About three months into the pandemic, I found myself struggling to arrive at meetings properly prepared. In the pre-pandemic old days, when driving from in-person meeting to in-person meeting, I had plenty of time to mentally preparefor the topics that were likely to come up, how I would respond to them, the ideas I wanted to present, etc. With today’s back-to-back virtual meetings, that time has disappeared. So I re-created it. I started scheduling what would otherwise be 60-minute meetings for 45 minutes. Parkinson’s Law tells us that the quantity of work will expand to meet the time allotted. The same is true for meetings – meaning that if we schedule an hour for a meeting, we’ll use an hour to do the work. If we schedule 45 minutes, we still get the work done, but leave ourselves with extra time thereafter to reflect on the meeting, coalesce personal action items and mentally prepare for our next meeting.

Third, think deeply about the meetings you expect others to attend and eliminate the ones that don’t make the best use of time. Upon reflecting on our own company’s list of meetings, I identified several that were no longer achieving their intended purpose. Every hour our teammates, customers, suppliers spend in a meeting is an hour they can’t spend performing other work that may add more value to our company or to theirs, so we eliminated our non-value-added meetings.

Finally, schedule time not to have meetings. For instance, reserving time before 9:00 a.m and after 4:00 p.m. for mission-critical meetings (few are) and otherwise leaving that time open to work on the business, not in it, will leave the finishing company leader way ahead of the field.

The era of virtual meetings has its advantages, just make that your time to do that which is truly important to your business isn’t “virtually eliminated”.