Today's episode is another my favorite tip episode where I go back to interviews from the past and I dig out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the thing that I got out of the interview that really impacted or resonated with me. Today's extract is from my chat with Professor Scott Sunenshein. Scott is a New York Times best selling author and professor of management at Rice University. I came across Scott's work quite a few months ago
when I read his second book, Joy at Work. Scott wrote Joy at Work with best selling author and Netflix star Marie Kondo, who's cleaning methods I've used in my own home over the years, and you tube might have come across marie condo as well. So Enjoy at Work Scott and Marie offers story study and strategies to help you eliminate clutter and make space for the work that really matters. There are actually two my favorite tip episodes that I have edited with Scott, so this is one
around how to dramatically improve meetings. So I think you'll really like this extract if you are struggling with meetings, or if you've got too many of them, or if they're too long or too inefficient. So Scott has a bunch of different strategies that you can use to improve the meetings that you're running at also the meetings that you're attending. So let's head on over to Scott.
Yeah, so there's an important distinction we have in the book between running a meeting and attending a meeting, And let's talk about the attending a meeting because that's the position that most people find themselves in where they get invitations to go to things and some of them are required, they're even the ones that are optional are sort of required.
Then it might look bad if they don't go. So the first thing that we do is you have to really get a sense of what the problem looks like and realize how much of your time are you actually spending in meetings, because what happens is they take half an hour on Monday, a couple of hours on Tuesday,
and they add up over time and you don't realize it. So, just like when you're going through the con Marie method and you're taking all of the clothes in your closet and you're putting them in a big heap of a pile on your bed, and then going through each one and realizing I got thirty shirts. I don't think I really need thirty shirts. You do the same with your meetings, and I like to say, put them on an index card.
Then have each index card represent a meeting and write down shortly in a sentence what the purpose of the meeting is, and then go through the same process metaphorically where you pick up each index card. Then you ask yourself essentially three questions. One is going to this meeting really necessary? It might be necessary because it's important than for your job, or sometimes you're just forced to go out of factors that are outside of your control, and
that's just the reality of many people's jobs. So those are the meetings that you're going to want to keep anyway. Secondly, you ask yourself, does going to this meeting move me any closer to the joyful future at work that I want my ideal work life? Am I going to learn something? Is this meeting going to build connection and foster relationships? Is it going to advance my career? So those are
all good reasons to keep going to a meeting. And then finally the third question is does this meeting bring
me more joy? And there are some times when we get together as a group, and I think a lot of people are feeling this right now in the pandemic, when social connection is much harder, where you just want to go there for that connection and that enrichment or that interaction or these meetings are so generative because they're sparking lots of ideas and creativity or your accomplishing a lot of work, and those are certainly meetings that you
also want to keep. So you go through these three key criteria, and then you have a pile of the meetings that you're going to keep and then the ones
that you're going to try to go out of. And that's where some of the hard work happens, because it's quite frankly, it's difficult to go to a meeting organizer and say, well, you're not going to say this meeting doesn't bring me joy, but you're going to do it in more diplomatic ways to try and get out of the meetings and maybe talk about how you don't feel like you have anything to contribute to the meeting, and
you know, a couple of things might happen. The meeting organizer might say, you know what, you're right, The direction of this group and how we meet has kind of evolved over time, and maybe you are not the most relevant person, or maybe the meeting organizer says to you, you know what, maybe we've been underutilizing you and I haven't realized that, you know, we could be running our meeting in a different way, and maybe that brings you joy
and realizing that you're appreciated in ways that you didn't realize. But you never get to these types of conversations by just resigning yourself and defaulting to the meetings on my calendar. I have to keep it.
Yeah, and I think it's I imagine it's probably a really challenging conversation for listeners to have with their boss or the meeting organizer. I'm lucky in that I don't have a boss, so I guess I've got a bit of freedom there. But it is challenging, Like, what have you seen or heard from readers in terms of what are like aside from those ways that you've mentioned, how else are they getting out of meetings?
Like?
For example, I'm imagining a close girlfriend of mine who works at one of the big banks here in Australia, and I feel like her life is meetings zoom meetings right now from eight am to six pm, sometimes later. And I kind of I think about her when I think about that meetings chapter actually, and I'm like, goodness, she needs to tidy up her meetings. But how is she going to do that because of all the poll takes a play in the bank.
Yeah, and politics are what really gets us into trouble. And I think it actually starts with ourselves before we even think about how we interact with other people. And what I mean by that is we have a sense of meeting fomo, this fear of missing out that if we don't have a seat at the table, it means that we're not worthwhile, or we're going to miss out
on an important decision. Or the person who attends the most meetings, they're the person who everyone thinks is working the hardest, when the reality is meetings are not really a way of keeping score. They're a way of getting work done. And if you're not getting work done in
a meeting, it's not worth going to. So I think the first thing we need to do is just get out of our head of our sense of fear that we're going to just miss out if we're not there in either a decision or in terms of what other people think of us, and realize that there's lots of ways of making contributions. And then the second thing to do is to then start interacting with the meeting organizer and realize that you know, for a variety of reasons, you know you might be asked to go to this
meeting that don't really make sense anymore. Maybe you've always attended but the direction of the meeting has changed, or maybe people feel like you want to be involved when you don't need to be involved in this specific aspect. So what I like to tell people is start by asking for an agenda, and that's going to accomplish a couple of things. The first is it's going to start a dialogue. And that's what a lot of this is, because you're right that in a lot of our work lives,
we don't have control. We work for other people and we work with other people, and we can't just decide to opt out. So when we ask for an agenda, we start a conversation that allows us to better evaluate whether or not this is really a meeting truly worth going for, and if the meeting organizer doesn't have an agenda. That's a pretty bad sign. And you can polite we ask back and say, well, would you mind sending an
agenda so I can better prepare. And if they still can't give you that agenda, again, that's a big red flag and you're going to want to try and get out of that meeting. If they send the agenda though, and that agenda looks like, well, there's not much I can contribute here. You can politely suggest, well, maybe someone in this other group or this other area of the company might be better suited for the meeting, and here's why,
and I'd recommend them. Or you can simply say, you know, given my scope of knowledge and responsibilities, I might not be the best fit for this, but you know, help me understand maybe you're seeing something I'm not. I'm happy to come if you feel like I have a contribution, but help me understand how I can best help. And once we have these conversations, I think we can kind of come to terms about those meetings that are most helpful for us to go to.
I personally find that agenda strategy really helpful. Something that we do with my tamment invent him and I actually got this trick from Brian Scrutemore, who's the co founder and CEO of one eight hundred Got Junk, and I interviewed him on the podcast quite a while ago, and something that he does. He has this thing at his organization where he says all meetings have to have a payer or a poet, which basically stands for purpose, agenda, outcomes, and he says if there's no poet, it's no goer.
And so at Inventium, we've been playing around with this and we now have a rule that if there's a meeting that involves three or more people, the meeting organizer needs to like the barrier to entry if you like to putting a meeting in someone's diary, is that they need to specify what's the purpose, agenda and desired outcomes
from the meeting. And we were reflecting on this at our team meeting yesterday actually and kind of going it really has made us stop and think before taking time from each other, because it does take thought, and most people kind of put a meeting in the diary, I find, which without actually thinking too much about purpose, agenda and outcomes.
I mean, it's just so easy to go into outlook and schedule a meeting, it's much harder to actually think about what you want to accomplish in that meeting. So these digital tools have really enabled the proliferation of meetings. So certainly practices where organizers of meetings are required to specify these things in advance with not only one I think cut down on a lot of unnecessary meetings, but too it would help the meetings that you have run much more effectively.
That is it for today's show. If you want to listen to the full episode, I link to that in the show notes, so you might want to check that out. And if you are enjoying how I work, I would be so deeply grateful if you just take five seconds out of your day to leave a review in Apple Podcasts. It might be a star rating or a few words, and by doing so, it helps other people find the show and it also brings a huge smile to my face. So thank you to the hundreds of people that have
left reviews. It is so deeply appreciated. So that is it for today's show, and I will see you next time.