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Many of us sit on multiple teams with multiple responsibilities.  This inevitably results in a daily barrage of meeting requests.  Without careful consideration and planning our days can be filled with more meeting time than work time.  I call this meeting bloat.  My calendar recently contained over 10 hours of regular weekly meetings.  This was in addition to the over ten hours of impromptu meetings I attend in a typical week.  Depressed and agitated over this discovery I started paring down. It was time to conquer meeting bloat.

There are two main types of meeting bloat that decrease productivity.  Both of them have simple solutions that can be implemented quickly to increase your productivity.

Meetings where you provide no value add: (Use good processes to replace meetings or at least your own meeting attendance)

Few things provide the total vexation one feels when sitting in an hour long meeting where you are absolutely not needed.  Most no value add meetings are imposed on us when we send a member of our team just to “keep an eye on things”.  I was recently required to attend a meeting where data center managers spoke with system administrators to create landing plans for new equipment installs.  The reason for me being in this meeting is because my team was having a difficult time getting landing approval for new equipment purchases.  I attended this meeting as a snitch.  If they didn’t do a good job I had to report out.  It was a complete waste of my time.  In the end we came up with a process where each new landing was discussed and if it didn’t obtain landing approval there was a report out and tasks were assigned.  This allowed a local systems administrator to replace me in the meeting.  With a little process I was able to free up 1 1/2 hours per week.

To prevent no value add meetings create processes where you abstain from the meeting but require the meeting attendees keep good notes and have clear report out responsibilities.  In some cases you can use a SharePoint list or something similar to track tasks and issues.

Meetings where there are too many people invited: (Fewer invites make more productive meetings.  Good meeting minutes enable fewer invites)

I once sat in a meeting where fourteen people from at least three countries were debating the color of a line separator on a web page.  I also frequently attend meetings where a complete team meets to discuss a project that only a small subset of the team is actively working on.  Each time this happens I calculate in my head the total time wasted by inviting too many people to the meeting.  The solution to this problem is very simple.  Whenever organizing a meeting decide who is essential to the meeting and who is not essential.  Only invite the essential people.  Everyone else can receive meeting minutes, tasks, and updates without attending.  Be sure to take detailed meeting minutes with clear tasks and ownership.

Organizing this way has two benefits.  The first is direct time savings.  The second is that you will have more efficient meetings with fewer distractions.  If you lead a team of ten people.  Consider creating a core team of three or four members.  Meet regularly with them and invite other team members as appropriate.  If you are designing an application there is no need to have a graphic designer sit through two hours of business logic discussions.  On the flip side, your database administrator does not care about the new graphic or color scheme.

** Note before reading this it would be helpful to read Taming Cubicle Nation to understand my motivation for creating this solution.

Where I work we use many Microsoft SharePoint websites.  SharePoint allows you to quickly create sites to organize your team, perform meeting management, task tracking, and other common tasks that allow collaboration.   I often make custom lists to track lite processes.  With all these abilities SharePoint has become an important cog in many corporate environments.  One of the major drawbacks to using SharePoint is that it is generally very slow.  Every click requires a post back to the server (unless using Data Views).  In my environment simply loading a team site or custom list may take 5 - 15 seconds.  Other sites I access also have similar performance problems.

One common solution to solving this problem is to open multiple Internet Explorer windows open to the sites you most commonly visit.  This can really clutter your task bar and desktop.  Another solution is to open tabs for each instance of a site you commonly access.  While not a bad solution it is often difficult to know what is in a particular tab.  Clicking on a tab moves your focus from the web page.  The solution I decided on utilizes several iframes on a single Web Page to load and display the common websites that I access.  I use the JQuery library to hide and show iframes when I click on the appropriate link.  What makes this nice is that I can give the file to a co-worker and they can type in the links that they want to use.  No coding or design is needed.

To use this solution download JQuery from http://jquery.com/ and rename the downloaded file to “jquery.js”.  Then save this file to your hard drive http://www.leogodin.net/MultiLinkLoader.html.  Edit MultiLinkLoader to add the links you want and make sure it is in the same directory as jquery.net.  From there you can double click the file and enjoy faster access to slow intranet sites.

This is not an elegant solution but it works well in my environment.  I’d like to hear how other people are solving similar problems.