I also started getting assertive about declining meetings if I thought they were asking for too much time. Too many folks were in the habit of reflexively blocking out a full hour for a decision that could be made in 15 minutes plus a briefing email that everyone could be expected to read ahead of time. I was surprised to find that that one didn't really burn any social capital. Far from being offended, many of my colleagues thought it was a good idea and started following suit.
1) If it's not clear what the meeting is for and there's no agenda - just decline it.
2) If there are too many people invited - say no. So often there's really only about 1.5 people on the room who you really need.
This is probably the best advice. Meetings should only be about hashing out the final details that might have had some contention. Start all conversations on email/slack and only meet when it becomes needed.
I have often thought that it would be great to limit the amount of meetings any person could organise on a monthly basis via some quota (say 6 hours a month). Everyone who wanted to organise a meeting over some trivia would then be forced to think twice - do I really need a meeting for this?
No agenda... not attending. Not reasonably necessary... not attending.
Sounds d!ckish/selfish, but survival skills in large orgs require some gambits.
I've used it pretty successfully, but it requires a little bit of discipline to make sure you have scheduled yourself out a few weeks in advance and that you don't start accepting meetings during that time.
(note: some people will figure out what you're doing when you have 6 hour blocks of time every Thursday. Schedule lots of smaller 30minute and 1hour meetings and people trying to invade your calendar won't know the difference)
(Of course, they still schedule over it. But they also schedule over real meetings, so I don't think there's some magical way to name a meeting that makes it seem important enough that the meeting locusts won't try and eat more hours than you have in a day.)
That, and responding to every meeting with "tentative", so that I'm free to re-evaluate the meeting's priority against real work up until the last possible second, has allowed me to keep my sanity in a culture of time wasting.
I did have one smart person slide a pack of crackers across the table at me. As I ate them I was declining every meeting with them for the next month. That solved that problem.
I get probably 5x more done per minute in the conference room.
In my next office, I am going to do a team-based pod system. Teams of 4-8. Single large room to start (2k SF or so), broken up however they decide (could be one huge room, or individual offices, or some combination, or smaller offices plus one big room, etc)
The thing I really want to try is offices with openable walls on 2-3 sides. One side opening into a shared team room; the other opening into a hallway or open plan space.
(The other trick is doing this somewhere with <$24/mo per SF real estate.)
It's sad that adding a calendar item of "Working - do not disturb" is not considered an option but cramming bullshit into your calendar is.
It gets worse the more people end up under your hierarchy and delegation becomes a major priority. But then your life is consumed by synchronization meetings so you know what your delegates have been doing on your behalf and can answer for them/find connections and opportunities across delegates.
My boss knows I don't work nights or weekends. I routinely ignore night and weekend emails because when I leave work I'm "unemployed" as it were until the next work day. Once you set the precedent, word gets around. No one asks me for anything other than to do my job. I've been doing this for years.
Besides, I have toddlers at home as well as teenager. My wife is knackered by the time I roll in, so I get home as soon as possible to help out.
There is a reason I ask to be in the server room with the lights out...
More concretely, by saying "no" to these meetings, a person is advertising that there are some standard capabilities that they don't have (e.g., "not skilled at working with non-technical people" appearing on an evaluation at some point). This will limit the kind of roles that person will be able to fill. What seems like a strength from one angle ("deeply technical") can look like a liability from above.
(Not a down voter, BTW, just have some personal experience with the problem.)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xizuaap0lbjt0k/Screenshot%202016-...
