Read Time: 3 minutes 58 seconds

I’ve heard the same question 3 times this week, so I have a hunch the universe is conspiring to tell me that should be this week’s playbook.

The question: How do I dig myself out of this avalanche of meetings?

And the more hybrid or remote the team, the more acute this problem seems to be. Which makes sense. How else do you know what your team is up to when they’re scattered around the world and spread across time zones?

But as I dug in with each of these leaders, it quickly became clear that the meetings are the symptom, not the root cause.

Now, I’ve already written about the need for leaders to build the skill of saying No. But what we haven’t talked about is measuring what matters. And anyone who has tracked their own eating habits or workouts knows that we often have a rosy perception of reality. What gets measured gets managed.

And while I firmly believe in the power of metrics and OKRs, I’ve found that the simple measure is often the most powerful.

So if I could only measure one thing for my team, it would be this:

The Good Time Index.

It's simple. But in its simplicity lies its power.

There is Good Time:

The rest is Bad Time:

Here's how to calculate it:

Most high-performing teams spend 80% of their days on Good Time.

What should you do if you’re short of that mark (which most teams are)?

Steal my template if you want to make it easy to get started.

If you're below the 80% target, you have two vectors to attack the waste:

Bake these agreements in individual development plans and your overall team goals and drive them to completion asap. The sooner you capture the gains, the longer you reap the rewards. This is management compounding.

The most common levers to drive up your Good Time Ratio:

Eliminate - Remove low-value tasks, outdated processes, and unnecessary meetings.

Automate - Use tools, software, or outsourcing for high-repetition, low-judgment tasks.

Consolidate - Redraw more efficient boundaries and create more logical groupings.

Tactics to make these gains take hold:

Most importantly: Don't overcomplicate it.

You don't want this process to devolve into Bad Time too.

This brings us to why we’re all here.

All these damn meetings.

And just ask your people. Based on a survey from Otter.ai, companies waste an average of $25,000 per employee each year on unnecessary meetings.

And now, armed with empirical data of Good Time vs. Bad Time, you’re ready to be a force for change. You can improve the meetings you’re expected to attend as well as the meetings you control.

For meetings you’re expected to attend:

Send an Agenda - “No agenda. No attenda.” You’re not being difficult. You’re holding your boss or colleagues accountable. 25% of my meetings get canceled because I asked the question and the person realized it was unnecessary.

Send a Delegate - I used to be flattered to be included in meetings. But that’s when I was driven by FOMO. Now I know real influence is judged by the meetings I don’t need to attend because my team is so darn good.

Send a Robot - Know what’s better than a highly paid delegate? A low-paid AI transcript service. In addition to Otter (which led the study above), companies like fireflies.ai and sembly.ai can be automatically added to meetings and produce high-fidelity transcripts and summaries.

Send a Message - Running a high-quality meeting is hard. But that doesn’t mean you should suffer in silence. Meet your obligation to provide constructive feedback for improving it until it’s a massively high ROI.

For the meetings you control:

Pull the Plug - Cancel it as a test. If nothing breaks or no one screams, don’t bring it back. If they do, build back smaller based on hyper-specific needs. If Shopify can cut 322,000 hours of meetings, you can try it with one.

Call the Option - Make attendance optional and mean it. If few or no people show up, thank them for voting candidly with their feet.

Shorten the Window - Try making that hour meeting 15 minutes. Borrow from the agile world and make people stand. Stack a couple of meetings back-to-back, so you have to end on time. Make zero exceptions. The team will appreciate your discipline.

Lengthen the Cadence - When a weekly meeting becomes monthly, you get back 75% of your capacity. A small change with big results.

Embrace the Break - In case going cross-eyed after your consecutive Zooms weren’t proof enough, check out the brain scans below and see how stress levels compound as meetings stack up without a break. And the power of the 10-minute breather. Just one more reason to wrap up a few minutes early.

Make it Their Meeting - This single flip completely massively increased the value of my 1:1 meetings. I broke this down fully a few months back.

Our mission is to impact 1,000,000 leaders positively. If this playbook would help someone on your team make better hiring decisions, please forward it to them.

And if someone forwarded this edition to you, please don't leave without hitting that Subscribe button now.

Thank you for reading. Appreciate you!

Dave