Meeting-Inventory

There are six types of work meetings, and every entry on your calendar is doing one of those six jobs. Once you can name which, the question of whether to keep it stops being a matter of taste. The reason this is worth twenty minutes is that meetings get judged by how they feel. A meeting you enjoy gets defended; a meeting you dread gets targeted. Neither is a signal about whether it should exist. The status meeting you like because it is the only time you talk to that team is still a status meeting, and the review you dread may be the only thing preventing a quarterly disaster. ...

Most time logs die on day four. Not because the person lacked discipline. Because the log asked for more precision than a working day can produce, and by Wednesday the honest options were falsifying it or abandoning it. Everyone abandons it, then concludes they are bad at tracking time. ...

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. ...

You already know the week is wrong. That is not the problem. The problem is that when someone asks you to justify changing it, “I have too many meetings” is not an argument — it is a mood, and moods lose to a manager who has a roadmap. ...