How to reclaim a few hours of meeting time a week (and still get more done)

Welcome to Work Smarter, Fast Company‘s newsletter on career, leadership, and productivity advice. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here.I’ve worked fully remotely for the last four years and while I love the flexibility, Zoom meetings and calls with my colleagues are often the only human interaction I have in between school drop-offs and pick-ups. Still, I’ve felt advanced Zoom fatigue when facing a day full of back-to-back meetings.While a few companies, like Shopify, have taken a radical approach and canceled all meetings (at least temporarily), that’s not a realistic approach for most companies. Some meetings are needed, so here’s some advice on how to make the most of the meetings on your calendar, no matter how many you have:

Never attend a meeting without an agenda

Having an agenda is the most basic piece of advice about meetings, and yet it’s also one of the most ignored. So many meetings are just on our calendars each week as “check-ins” or “status updates.” If you don’t have a plan for what you’ll talk about (and who will lead), the meetings are guaranteed to meander. If you can’t think of at least two significant agenda items, then your meeting likely falls into the “this meeting could be an email” category.

Speaking of email, when you set the agenda, make sure you give the meeting attendees the heads-up on what you’ll be covering ahead of time (either in the meeting invite or over Slack or email). If you’re stuck on how to frame an agenda, start with a few conversation-starting questions.

Don’t default to hour or half-hour meetings

We fill the time we have. Have you ever noticed if a meeting is scheduled for an hour, you nearly always use the entire time? Take that same meeting and shave off 15 minutes and it’s very likely that you’ll get the same amount accomplished. You can try the same method with shorter meetings too: 30-minute meetings can become 20 minutes.

Ten or 15 minutes might not sound like a huge time savings, but when you add it up across a week, you’ll end up with hours back. And as an added bonus, those small pockets of time can be a real sanity saver when you are in back-to-back meetings. You’ll have the breathing room to check email or get up from your desk.

Replace some one-on-one meetings with group check-ins

Zeb Evans, CEO of ClickUp, takes a controversial stance about one-on-one meetings, writing in a recent article for Fast Company that “Many executives use one-on-ones to privately align on their preferred decision or outcome for an upcoming topic. While they don’t necessarily have bad intent, it creates a culture of closed-door decisions made without transparency.” Evans says that “One-on-ones for individual contributors are necessary for morale, connection, and coaching. But for executives, they are costly, ineffective, and inefficient.” Instead, he suggests setting up daily group check-ins on the same topics that would be discussed across several different one-on-one meetings.

Don’t worry about it

Not all “unproductive” time is wasted. Just as there is value in water-cooler conversations or an after-work happy hour, there is team-building value in having a little “unproductive” chat about family, vacations, sports, the weather—whatever. In the quest to get the most things done, we shouldn’t forget that we are people, too.