If you find yourself getting bored in office meetings or that you spend maybe less than 5 minutes in the entire hour contributing anything useful to the entire discussion, you probably don’t need to be there.
The problem is that most people expect you to be there anyway, simply because that is what you are suppose to do when invited to a meeting.
The need to attend in-office meetings can be a great hang up for people who are thinking about telecommuting.
Because of that, you want to eliminate as many of your in-office meetings as possible before requesting permission to telecommute.
In this post, I am going to explain a method you can use to eliminate most if not all of your in-office meetings from your schedule.
In Meetings, Either Be Concise or Don’t Say Anything
Whenever you are in a meeting, don’t add to the energy of frivolous discussion that naturally occurs.
Most meetings have no clear outcome, so what usually happens is people end up discussing topics as they come up to fill the time.
For progress report type meetings, don’t ramble on to make your work sound more involved than it really is.
Communicate the main message that your manager wants to hear, then just keep quiet.
Only speak when you need to, and when you do speak, stick to the point.
This will give off the impression that you don’t like wasting time and that you are a very effective and efficient person.
How This Will Eliminate Your Need to Attend Meetings
Effective managers will not ask you to attend a meeting they know you don’t need to attend.
An effective manager will also understand if you tell them you would prefer not to attend a meeting if you feel your attendance is not completely necessary (in essence, you only need to communicate a short progress report which you could easily transmit via phone or email).
Ineffective co-workers or managers will have as many meetings as they can to fill up the day in order to look busy without actually accomplishing anything.
These are meetings of indulgence and you want to eliminate these completely from your schedule.
If you display efficiency and conciseness in meetings, this will do 2 things:
- Make the time wasters feel uncomfortable (thus not inviting you to attend future meetings)
- Makes it crystal clear how necessary it is for you to be at the meeting (thus giving you a valid excuse not to want to attend future meetings if your presence is deemed unnecessary)
If you sit in a 1 hour meeting and only spend a maximum of 2 minutes to communicate your main point, you probably don’t need to be there.
Some people might argue that even if you don’t speak, the reason you are at the meeting is to get updated on the progress of others.
I have found that even after attending these so called “update” meetings, I don’t remember half of what was said later on and I still need to refer to the meeting minutes which are forwarded to everyone via email.
Attending meetings whereby you only need to sit and listen should be avoided whenever all possible as the outcome of these meetings can usually be brought to light with a quick 2 minute run through of the meeting minutes.
Reasons You Can Give To Not Attend Meetings
Eliminating meetings altogether is a gradual process that starts with displaying effectiveness in the meeting itself.
This is important to communicate to your colleagues that you are about productivity and not about wasting time in meetings.
Once you have established this in their minds, you’re going to want to start rejecting invitations to meetings.
Here are 2 valid reasons you can give, though feel free to be creative:
- There is something you are urgently trying to finish
- You have an important phone call that you are expecting while the meeting is taking place and you don’t want to disrupt the meeting
If even after giving your reason(s) they insist you attend, try saying that you just want to skip the meeting just this once and that you will follow up through the meeting minutes or with a colleague later.
If they still insist you attend, ask them for the purpose of the meeting so you can prepare your part. Usually there is no clear purpose for meetings and asking this question further increases their discomfort and reluctance to invite you to future meetings.
This also discourages them from inviting you to meetings whereby they simply need you to sit and listen.
Next, ask if you can present your part first so that you can leave the meeting early in order to continue working, to deal with an urgent task or to receive an urgent phone call.
Over time, people will gradually get the idea that they should not invite you to meetings and pretty soon you won’t have to be attending meetings at all.
Take Action
For the next week, try to avoid at least one in-office meeting by using the tips above.
State that you have something important to attend to and you would like to skip the meeting just this once. That is usually enough to get out of a meeting in most cases.
If successful, attempt to apply the rest of the advice in this post to try and eliminate all of the unnecessary meetings in your schedule.
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Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
