Decline one meeting – asap!

How many meetings have you got this week? 

Too many, right?

Here’s a simple way to improve that:

Remove one of them

It’s simple:

1. Look at all this week’s meetings
2. Choose the one that’s least useful to you
3. Decline it

There are lots of ways you can decline it – examples:

• Just decline it – no explanation
• Decline it, with an emailed explanation
• Decline it, with a verbal explanation
• Send someone in your place
• Send the Owner the info you’d share in the meeting, and ask them to share it for you

Or if you can’t decline it all, but could decline some: 

1. Contact the Owner
2. Explain you can only contribute to agenda items X and Y
3. Ask if they can be moved to the start of the meeting
4. On the day, turn-up for those items, then leave

If you’re concerned you’ll miss-out on learning the actions following the meeting – ask someone to share the Actions Arising with you afterwards. 

Three final points – to answer questions you might well have:

• It’s a meeting invitation.  Not a court summons.  You don’t have to go
• If you think missing the meeting will cause a problem – to you or the other attendees – go to that meeting! Choose a different meeting to decline
• When I first started declining meetings, I worried that people might burst into floods of tears, devastated that Andy Bounds wasn’t there.  It turned out… nobody cared (as long as I declined the correct ones!)

Imagine if you declined your worst meeting of the week – every week.  You’d give yourself an extra 50 hours every year. Fifty hours! That you would have spent in rubbish meetings…

Action Point

• Look at this week’s calendar
• Identify the meeting that will be most rubbish
• Decline it, using one of the above techniques
• Remember – if declining it might cause a problem, suck it up and go