The meeting trap
Booking a meeting solves the problem every time. That is exactly why it turns into a bottleneck - and why the habit is so hard to notice before it has cost you a quarter.
This one started as a confession rather than a lesson, and it is a trap worth naming because it is built out of a good habit rather than a bad one.
The situation. There is a problem to solve. It cannot be solved alone - it needs input from several people who each hold one piece of it.
The response. Book a meeting. Get everyone in one room, work it through, leave with a decision.
Does it work? Yes. Every single time. That is the trap.
Why something that always works becomes the problem
Because it scales in the wrong direction. More projects means more problems, and more problems means more meetings. The habit that solved the first ten situations is the same habit that, at thirty, has quietly eaten the week.
Then you notice what the meetings actually look like. A one-hour slot, four to ten people, and the problem resolved in the first ten minutes. The rest of the hour is the cost of having everyone in the room for those ten minutes - paid by everyone, including the people who had nothing to contribute and knew it.
At board level it gets worse, because the constraint stops being the hour and starts being the calendar. Aligning several senior people can take two to three weeks before the conversation happens at all. The decision is not slow because the thinking is hard. It is slow because the diary is the bottleneck, and nobody put that on the project plan.
What we changed
- Learn to write internally. This is the one that pays for all the others. The skill is finding the balance between a message short enough that people read it and enough context that nobody has to ask a clarifying question. Most meetings exist because the first attempt at writing it down was too thin to act on.
- Use the project tool first. Before booking anything, the question is whether this could be a thread on the task it concerns. Often it can, and the written answer is more useful a month later than anyone's memory of a call.
- Use the project tool properly. Separate point, deliberately. A board nobody trusts generates more meetings than having no board at all, because people meet to find out what is actually happening.
- Short standups or async updates. Fifteen minutes, standing, or written. Not our personal favourite format, but it works well for some teams and it is dramatically cheaper than what it replaces.
- Make attendance genuinely optional. Mark people optional and mean it - which means the notes have to be good enough that skipping it is a real choice, not a career risk.
- Price the meeting before you book it. Add up the hourly cost of everyone invited. If the topic is not worth that number, change the format.
The rule that did most of the work
That last one turned out to be far more powerful than it sounds, and the reason is not the arithmetic. It is that the cost of a meeting is normally invisible. Nobody signs off on it, no budget line moves, and so a recurring ninety-minute slot for eight people gets created in four seconds and survives for two years.
Put a number on it and the conversation changes immediately. It stops being "could everyone join?" and becomes "is this worth eight hundred euros of the company's time?" - which is a question people are perfectly capable of answering honestly, as soon as somebody asks it.
It was useful enough that we built a small calculator for it, and it is still in regular use here. It runs entirely in your browser, there is no sign-up, and no salary figure is ever sent anywhere.
Open the meeting cost calculator
There are two ways to use it. Run the live timer during a meeting and watch the number climb, which is uncomfortable in a productive way. Or price one before you put it in the calendar, which is the version that actually changes behaviour.
The bottom line
Meetings are genuinely powerful. Some problems only come apart when the right people are in a room, and trying to solve those in writing is its own expensive mistake.
But the default has drifted. The skill worth building is not running a better meeting - it is recognising the ones that should never have been booked. The best people we have worked with are not the ones with the sharpest agendas. They are the ones who know when not to meet at all.