Manager

Getting out of one standing meeting is a personal manoeuvre and the exit message covers it. This is the other thing: reviewing the whole recurring set on a schedule, as a team, so that meetings stop accumulating by default. They accumulate because creating a standing meeting takes four minutes and ending one requires somebody to volunteer an opinion about somebody else’s work. The asymmetry is the entire mechanism. No individual meeting is the problem; the absence of any moment at which the set gets questioned is. ...

Four roles belong in a working meeting: the person who decides, the people who have to agree, the people who hold information the decision needs, and the person keeping the record. Everyone else is there to be informed, and being informed is not a reason to spend an hour. ...

A meeting you dislike is not evidence of anything. A meeting that fails one of four specific tests is, and each failure has exactly one sensible repair. Run the four questions, take the repair they point at, and if the meeting fails the fourth one, stop repairing it and end it. ...

Nine decline messages. Copy them, change the nouns, send them. Each one comes with the situation it is built for and the specific way it fails, because a script used in the wrong place does more damage than no script at all — a message that is too formal for a peer reads as a rebuke, and one that is too casual for someone senior reads as dismissal. ...

Advice about declining meetings is almost always written by someone with an interest in you declining more of them. That is not a conspiracy; it is just that the people producing the advice are mostly selling calendar software, and their post has to end at a signup button rather than at a complication. ...

The meeting has been on your calendar for a year. You have stopped remembering why you joined. Nobody has asked you a question in it since spring, and you have started doing other work during it, badly. You cannot decline your way out of this. A calendar decline handles one Wednesday; the series has fifty more. And the silent version — quietly declining a recurring invite week after week — is the single most misread way to get out of a recurring meeting, because from the organiser’s side it looks identical to unreliability. ...

Declining your manager’s meeting is a different act from declining anyone else’s, and the difference is not politeness. It is that your manager is the person who decides what you work on. A decline is a statement that you have re-decided it, and depending on the manager, that is either welcome, unremarkable, or a problem. ...

Most advice about declining meetings is written as though the only obstacle were finding the right words. Find the polite phrasing, send it, and the meeting goes away. The words are the easy part. The hard part is that a decline is a small political act — you are telling someone their claim on you is worth less than something else — and it has a price. Usually a small one. Occasionally not. The advice that pretends otherwise is written by people who either have no manager or have not had one recently. ...

There is a whole category of web page that will multiply attendees by salaries and tell you a recurring meeting costs your company $47,000 a year. They are free, they are well built, and most of them exist to collect your email address. ...

How many meetings is too many is a question that wants a number back. Something like “more than fifteen hours a week”, so you can hold your calendar up against it and be told you are right. The number does not exist. Not in a form you should quote, and not in a form that would help you if it did. ...