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Discussion on: How many meetings do you have per week?

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Ben Halpern

What advice would you give someone who wants to manage their career in a direction that limits meetings — even if it means giving up on title and salary opportunities to some extent?

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Zikitel22 • Edited

From the top of my head

  • Early stage startups - how many meetings do you need to sync 3-4 people given they are mostly seniors :)
  • Being part of "innovation department" - never experienced it myself but from what i heard this is almost no meeting environment
  • Lone wolf freelancer/consultant - well you have meetings with clients but i doubt that they happen more than once per week
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Jeremy Friesen

If you want to limit meetings, there are two opposite tactics:

1) Ensure that all meetings have agendas. If there are none, cancel them. Also, meetings are best as knowledge shares and should generate action items to help further share knowledge.
2) Be in a role that is a turn the crank: "Hey boss, tell me what bug you want me to fix next."

Meetings aren't bad, with someone facilitating and taking notes they are powerful collaboration events. But most meetings (beyond one on ones) are often suboptimal at best (and counter-productive at worst).

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Jeremy Friesen

In fact, I once ran a few "meetings as a service" experiments: takeonrules.com/2021/03/04/meeting...

I blocked out two hours, people showed up, shared what they were going to work on, then did that work. Towards the end, we reconvened and again shared what we accomplished and where next we were going to focus.