Take a good, hard look at your calendar. How many meetings are just recurring? Don’t count your one-on-one meetings with your coworkers. Count the other ones. Chances are that you’re spending close to 15 hours each week on meetings that are begging for an agenda. Not the other way around. Some managers I’ve observed have a recurring meeting to discuss the agenda for another recurring meeting. Let me restate this differently.

These recurring meetings take up to 38% of your time every week. That’s two in every five hours, lost to meetings without agendas. 

Ask yourself some hard questions about these interactions.

• How many of these meetings have over eight people? Any more than that, and you’re wasting your time. There’s no way the meeting is collaborative and is productive at the same time.

• How many of these meetings are about passive information transfer? Emails, documents, even slidedocs share that information more efficiently. They are also more permanent than a conversation.

• How often do you actively engage in these meetings? If the answer is “occasionally”, then do you need to lose time with it regularly?

Now I understand that in some work-cultures, your bosses may want you to show up in meetings for you to seem “visible”. That’s a problem we can’t solve at the individual level. However, if your organisation gives you the autonomy to use your time effectively, then consider voting with your feet for an async-first culture. Decline those recurring meetings. And if you’ve set up some of these meetings, think about deleting them and freeing up your own time. People can still meet up in smaller groups for agendas that require meetings. You’ll give them time to do exactly that!