Maybe You Should Stop Attending Big Meetings

You Might Be Able to Reclaim Hours of Your Life at Very Little Cost

As the number of meeting attendees grows, the usefulness of the information communicated drops in an inverse power relationship. Put more simply: big meetings are mostly useless for attendees.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that you skip all large meetings. After all, most of us must attend some big useless meetings if only to look like team players and remain employed. C’est la vie. 

But at the margin, it’s a superpower to overcome your FOMO and choose not to attend meetings where you stand to learn very little. And one of the best predictors of whether a meeting will be useful to attend is the number of people on the invite.

 Where Interesting Information Comes From

Let’s say that you have a 1:1 meeting with a peer somewhere that you can reasonably assume you won’t be overheard. In the course of that conversation, you will probably feel free to express yourself openly. 

It’s still work, so you might not talk about politics or other sensitive topics, but if you have a reasonably trusting relationship, you’ll probably feel comfortable discussing office gossip, speculative observations, or personal topics.

These one-on-one conversations are the venues in which the most interesting information is exchanged. The confirmation that someone got promoted, news of a coworker’s departure, an important reorg, and the unpublished results of a recent product launch are almost always broached here first. 

It’s why it’s so ominous for a boss to put an unexpected 1:1 on your calendar without explanation. It’s also why 1:1s can be so much fun: they are a space not just to conduct business and complete projects, but build trust and learn about your coworkers in a more personal setting. 

1:1s are the ultimate source of useful information because the attendee count is exactly 1.

Where Interesting Information Goes to Die

Now imagine a meeting with 100 attendees. The people leading that meeting must be very careful about how they communicate. A single ad-libbed response or tasteless joke can be misinterpreted, offend, or both. 

The people who lead big meetings tend to be senior leaders. Their job is to herd the organizational cats in a particular direction. Misinterpretations and offense fundamentally undermine their ability to accomplish that task.

So senior leaders do the rational thing. They memorize talking points, scrub their language of any ambiguous phrases, and relentlessly emphasize the positive. Truly exceptional senior leaders can do these things and still communicate important information, but for the majority, useful information is collateral damage in this preparation process.

This results in an information density for attendees towards the right side of the graph.

Experiment With Strategic Non-Attendance

Everyone is busy. There are always too many things to accomplish and too few hours in the day. The only way you’ll be able to tell for sure if you absolutely must attend a meeting is to try not attending.

If you’re right and that meeting was just noise in your schedule, you just created time out of thin air! You can use it to get ahead on deliverables, catch up on email, or prep for an important presentation. 

If you’re wrong and you really did need to attend the meeting, you’ll probably get negative feedback very quickly and can attend the next one. 

So what are you waiting for? Take a look at your schedule for the upcoming week, identify a meeting with too many invitees and try using it as a focus block instead.

Your calendar and sanity will thank you.