Many engineers, myself included, struggle with meetings. Meetings occupy a significant amount of our working lives, and often get a reputation of being a waste of time, or something that impacts productivity in a negative way.

Hybrid working environments are here to stay and by their nature require more meetings. This means the oldest meeting advice of “just cancel them” doesn’t work in practice. Instead, here are a few tips that I have found useful over the years in order to get the most out of meetings.

Watch out for triangles of communication

One-on-one meetings are common on teams to check-in with your coworkers, give and receive mentorship and advice, and provide feedback. Often, people attempt to restrict these meetings from discussing tactical work, since that sort of discussion can happen more openly, and will always grow to fill the meeting time (instead of allowing space for more important discussions like feedback). I have rarely seen a blanket ban on tactical work in practice, so instead I try to watch out for something else: situations where tactical discussions are going around in a triangle.

Imagine you are on a project team with 2 other people (3 total). If you meet to talk with one person on the project, and you discuss the project, then later on you (or they) will also have to tell the other team member. So far this is not ideal (it’s like a game of telephone), but the real problem happens when the third person has feedback or information that they need to tell you! Now the information has gone around in a triangle, and will probably keep going around. If this information transfer is happening in one-on-one meetings, it’s especially slow, since those meetings don’t happen every day.

If I see this happening, I take it as a sign that a focused sync meeting (at some cadence) is needed instead. There, tactical information can be shared with everyone at once, and you can collapse the triangle into a point.

Take notes

A common problem with meetings is that they end and people go home or log off and then people forget what was discussed. This was arguably even more of a problem when most meetings took place face-to-face, but it still happens in virtual meetings.

Taking notes is an obvious solution to do this, and instead of trying to remember everything at the end, I highly recommend taking them, publicly, as the meeting is going along (e.g. while screen-sharing the notes). If someone sees you mis-type or misunderstand something, they can correct it on the spot instead of when they review the notes later (which they might not do). Another benefit of this approach is that it can keep the meeting moving forward, since if a conversation is going off-topic, and you stop taking notes about it. This might signal to the speaker that it’s time to get back to the agenda.

Get your most important question answered

I’ve commonly heard the meeting advice of “make sure every meeting has an agenda”, and have found it somewhat useful, but often overkill. Meetings often can (and should!) be short, and don’t need a lengthy agenda. What I try to do instead is make sure that I know the number one question I want to get answered in a meeting before I go.

If you identify a key question or decision that you need to make to unblock yourself, that’s often all that’s needed to make a meeting productive. You can even put your question in the notes ahead of time to make sure you don’t forget, and maybe people would call this simple format an “agenda” of some kind.

At the latest, halfway through the meeting, I try to make sure that my question has at least been asked. It sometimes will require another meeting to get to the final answer, and that’s okay. The key is to at least make sure the question is being worked on, which guarantees that from your perspective, the meeting was not a waste of time.