We had this PM who ran our meetings, when people phoned in from the road she would say, "please take your calls while your aren't driving" and boot them from the meeting. Now I do the same thing and you should to.
No, because it isn't reasonable. What would be reasonable is for the individual receiving the call to excuse themself leaving the rest of the meeting to carry on. Isn't this already the standard?
Client-serving is very different, and I'm sure a good CEO would insist that you take the call rather than be in a meeting. I was thinking more about from the developer angle, so I guess I should have been clearer.
Like I said below, interrupting a meeting and leaving to take a call from your mechanic because your car is ready, or from a friend to plan your activity that night, is rude, and I've seen a lot of that.
As a PM —- you know the guy who is filling your calendar up with meetings and preventing you from doing the real work —- I love this. Please send us and others signals. Be brutal and direct.
“This meeting doesn’t have an agenda, so I won’t attend. Feel free to send me notes and highlight your ask.”
“I am happy to meet, but only for 15 minutes instead of 30.”
You don’t even need to justify it, unless that justification is intended to send a signal to the person trying to take up your time that they must do better if they want to succeed in doing so.
I picked up the habit of doing this manually a couple years ago, when my meeting load mushroomed following a reorg.
I also started getting assertive about declining meetings if I thought they were asking for too much time. Too many folks were in the habit of reflexively blocking out a full hour for a decision that could be made in 15 minutes plus a briefing email that everyone could be expected to read ahead of time. I was surprised to find that that one didn't really burn any social capital. Far from being offended, many of my colleagues thought it was a good idea and started following suit.
Or choose to leave. I have walked out of meetings, having been repeatedly interrupted despite telling the interrupter that I did not appreciate it.
I’m not hard line on “no interrupting”, but if I ask someone to stop, then I expect them to stop. Or I’ll just leave. I have other things I could be doing.
> For me though, number of meetings you get pulled into without Agenda or need is the number one time killer!
I solved that by just not going to those.
If someone invites me and has no agenda, I reply and ask "What is this about? What are we deciding?". That generally prompts an agenda, but in the rare cases where it doesn't, I will just reject the request and literally not show up. After I've done this once with someone, I generally don't get another invite from them without an agenda and clear purpose. (Maybe they just stopped inviting me, but that's fine with me too).
If the person sending the request is your superior, you have to be a bit more tactful, but it can still be done -- you may have to show up anyway, but really drive hard to get to decisions and/or action items (and get them written down and shared with attendees). If the meeting really does turn out to be useless (no decision, no action items) you can privately meet with your superior to discuss that later, and hopefully convince them it wasn't worth spending hundreds of dollars to do literally nothing.
> That includes canceling meetings we were invited to with a "nah this can be an email"
I've done this, and it went down really well. Even if you can't cancel the meeting, you can send a single person instead of the whole team. You can also send people back to their desks if their part in the meeting is over. I was also adamant on all meetings having some sort of description and agenda, so that people can tell if it's worth attending or not. That was more difficult.
This is good advice if you have the power to do that. But often people just don't have that control. Meeting times are set by managers/team leads/etc and you are required to be at them. If you decline because it will 'hurt your flow', this will not be well received by most managers.
But it's not unprofessional to walk into a meeting, where the combined pay of everyone present is being spent for the purpose of discussing whatever's on the agenda, and have your phone going off — let alone answering it — distracting the group from that stated purpose?
Really? Your call is important enough to waste the time of everyone else in the room?
reply