I like meetings, because that’s when I interact with other people and I can learn a lot: About the company I am working at, about the other participants, and about myself. Meetings are the time when I feel: I can feel sad, angry, worried, enlightened, invigorated and inspired. If I am awake and aware, positive as well as negative feelings are clear indicators that something relevant and important was shared or discussed.

These feelings help me prioritize, create ideas for solutions that matter and provide clarity on what does not need to be done.

There is only one problem: There are so many meetings, and my capacity to be awake and aware is limited. Sometimes my calendar at the beginning of the week misses the blank space to act on the clarity and awareness gained leading to a state where the meeting time is wasted.

It clearly isn’t only me: I have attended meetings, where participants were clearly disengaged, didn’t have anything to contribute, or over-contributed which (in my opinion) is often another aspect of too many meetings: If I am stressed and out of touch with myself, I am not as good at filtering what information is needed to bring the discussion forward: I am more likely to miss the option of participating in a conversation in the most powerful way: by saying nothing deliberately. I can still feel in those meetings, but it is mostly boredom, sadness and stress. For a reason: I shouldn’t be in this meeting!

So, when it is so easy to plaster a calendar with recurring meetings these days, how to clean them out? How can I tell the grain from the salt here? I think the emergence of artificial intelligence can help. Let me tell you how:

  1. Take meeting notes or maybe even transcriptions of meetings that you believe might be bad.
  2. Gather them in a central place, load them up to a generative AI chat bot and ask it to “generate the next two meeting notes”.
  3. Read the results and think about whether the results are realistic.
  4. If the results seem utterly realistic, delete the meeting from your calendar immediately! It is completely useless!

That’s it. Good meetings are for humans. If your discussion can easily be reproduced by a machine, it is useless, because there is nothing being discussed at all: It is just some random production of meeting notes. Maybe you can make an art project out of it. But then again: Why not use an AI chat bot for that?

The good news: You don’t even have to use artificial intelligence for it. With some deep or maybe even shallow thought, you can probably come up with step 2 yourself. That accelerates the process even more. Maybe you still want to do the AI bot steps, and see what happens yourself, but I am certain it is actually not necessary. You know those meetings, and you know how an AI chatbot works. They are actually pretty dumb.

Recurring meetings make sense if these meetings have a clear agenda on a recurring basis: For example, in many software companies, we try to plan out our work for two weeks. So every two weeks we check in on what we learned and plan the next set of work. I could schedule that meeting when I have to, but it would happen every two weeks. Especially in remote companies, it also makes sense to schedule unstructured 1-on-1 meetings with just one other participant. To keep it human, to have a chance to learn about a person outside of work topics. But there always needs to be blank time to process the information from such meetings for both sides. Hence, I try to keep them short and in the scheduled time frame.

Other than that: I like to schedule meetings when I have to. How do I know when I have to schedule a meeting? By canceling most recurring meetings, taking a walk, thinking about what information I need to gather or share next, what decisions need to be made, and who needs to be in the room for that. You know, the way an empowered human would do it, as opposed to a worker enslaved by his calendar.

Over the last weeks, I reduced the amount of recurring meetings that I scheduled by the above method (without actually contacting an AI bot). Over the year, it frees up 3-4 weeks of work which I now can now use to intentionally talk to people, think intentionally or actually do something. :) I also shared my methods with others with the effect that other meetings that I don’t own, are shortened, freeing up more time not only for myself, but for others as well.

Oh, and before going into a recurring meeting, it is also a powerful practice to ask beforehand: Is my participation needed?

Yes, good boundaries! That’s the new frontier!