Regularly Prune Meetings to Create Time and Space

30-Second Version

• Structured regular meetings have become the default way of getting on the same page, yet there are ways to refine and reduce these to gain more time back.
• Pruning back our meetings pays back substantial and compounding returns. If you could prune away just one hour per week of meetings, you would win back a full work week per year.
• There are many ways of reducing meetings by an hour per week, including deleting a single one-hour meeting, collapsing two meetings, or reducing the default length of meetings.
  

The Full Read

Meetings are part of the fabric of educational life. It really isn’t a surprise that we’re drowning in them. Educational work is human-centred work, so ongoing communication and alignment are crucial to ensure we are sharing necessary information and making collective decisions. When done well, meetings can be a highly effective and efficient way of sharing information, making decisions and taking action. Yet, over time, teams, schools and systems build up a legacy of default meetings that can diminish in purpose, effectiveness and efficiency. Enter the benefits of pruning. 

Pruning our meetings also pays back substantial, ongoing and compounding returns. If you could prune away just one hour per week of meetings, you would win back a full work week per year. I’ll say that again: if you could win back 1–1.5 hours per week by pruning meetings across 40 weeks, that would add up to 40–60 hours. This means you have the ability to find an entire additional work week per year simply by cutting down one hour of meetings per week. If you and a team of three other leaders or peers did this in your school, you would unlock an additional full month of time in the year! When applied to a staff of 40–50 that could equate to unlocking the time and energy of an additional full-time staff member. 

There are many ways to get to that initial target of reducing meetings by an hour per week. Which of the following approaches might work for you? 

• Delete a single one-hour meeting.
• Collapse two one-hour 1:1 meetings.
• Reduce the default length of three meetings from 60 to 40 minutes.
• Change the cadence of a two-hour meeting from weekly to fortnightly.
• Create a meeting blackout period for certain weeks in the term.
• And many, many more!

Why not consider a review period over the next week where you examine what’s really happening in your current meeting cadence? Of course, the goal of this is not purely to reduce or get rid of meetings. The goal is to win back time and mental energy to focus on the things that matter most. Pruning meetings allows us to rethink the default structure of meetings in our context. 

Run experiments

Running pruning experiments is a great way to avoid the need to get everyone to have complete buy-in from the outset. Instead, run a time-bound experiment and see what is gained and what is “really lost”. In our experience, people rarely decide to go back to defaults, but knowing it is an option can reduce the angst experienced by some at the outset. Once people have tasted more efficient, focused collaboration – not to mention the chance of winning back one or even two additional work weeks per year just by removing an hour of meetings per week – they’ll likely be very grateful for the upside of engaging in pruning.

As a final word of encouragement, you will need to work hard to protect the space you’ve created through pruning meetings and ensure that the time is reallocated to the highest-impact tasks for effectiveness or sustainability.