Scripts

A no-meeting day is not hard to announce and not hard to keep for a fortnight. It dies somewhere around week seven, from exceptions that were each individually reasonable and that nobody counted. So the rollout is mostly one thing: deciding what the exceptions are before anybody asks for one. Everything else — the announcement, the enforcement, the review — takes about ninety minutes of work in total. The exception list is what makes those ninety minutes hold. ...

There is a specific meeting this post is about. Everyone in it privately thinks it has stopped being useful. Nobody will say so, because saying so means telling the person who set it up that the thing they set up has stopped being useful. So it runs every Thursday, at reduced attendance, and it will run until someone leaves the company. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Most meeting advice offers two options: attend, or decline. Almost everything useful happens between them. The reason to care about the middle is not squeamishness. It is that a partial exit is often the better outcome on the merits — you keep the part of the meeting that was doing something and drop the part that was not — and it is granted at a far higher rate, because nobody has to concede anything. An organiser who would refuse “I’m coming off this” will readily agree to “I’ll join for the budget item”. ...

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. ...