How Many of Your Meetings Actually Need You?

What No One Tells You — #16 How Many of Your Meetings Actually Need You? YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2isxo4XWPPE —————————————————————————————————————————————————— Hello everyone and welcome back to What No One Tells You. This is the podcast where we skip the theory and get straight to the things that actually make a difference in your day-to-day life as a manager. I'm your host Claudia Lojito and this is episode 16. And I'm really excited about this one because today we are doing something a little different. I'm giving you an exercise, a real one, something you can start this very week. And I promise you that by Friday, it will have shown you something about yourself that no feedback session, no 360 review and no coaching conversation has ever managed to surface quite so clearly. But before I tell you what it is, let me paint you a picture that I suspect will feel very familiar. You're sitting in a meeting and someone is presenting a slide you've already seen. Someone else is asking a question that honestly could have been an email. And meanwhile, you've got three urgent things waiting in your inbox, a decision that needs your sign off, and a team member who has been trying to get 5 minutes of your time since this morning. But here you are sitting, nodding, occasionally glancing at your laptop in a way that you hope looks like engaged note takingaking when really you are mentally calculating how long until this is over. It sounds familiar. Of course it does because this is just a regular Monday. Now here's what no one tells you. The problem isn't the meetings themselves. It's that you have absolutely no idea how many of them actually need you there. And I mean actually need you, not just it's in the calendar, so I show up. So this week, I want you to attend your meetings exactly as you normally would. Nothing changes, no dramatic gestures. But at the end of each one, before you close your laptop or walk out of the room, you're going to ask yourself three honest questions. Did I speak? Did what I said genuinely change anything? and would the outcome have been any different if I simply hadn't been there? Score yourself and keep a tally in your notebook or your phone or post it on your desk, wherever works for you. And do it every single day for the whole week because by Friday, you will have a number and that number is going to be very, very illuminating. And here's something I'm especially excited to tell you. I have created a free one-page PDF tracker that goes with this episode with the scoring system laid out, ready to use phrases you can lift directly into your next email and Friday reflection prompts to make you make sense of what you find. You can download it from the show notes or from my LinkedIn post and I genuinely encourage you to print them out or keep them open on your phone this week because it will make this whole exercise 10 time easier and a lot more satisfying to do. Right now let's get into the practical detail because that's why you are here. How to score quickly without overthinking it. So, the three questions work, but only if you're honest with yourself. So, let me give you a color system that makes it even faster and removes the temptation to hedge. After each meeting, give it one of three colors: green, orange, or red, and spend no more than 30 seconds deciding. Green means you contributed something that genuinely moved things forward. Whether that was a decision, a direction, a piece of clarity that wasn't in the room before you opened your mouth. Orange means you were present and said a few things. But if you're really honest with yourself, the meeting would have landed in roughly the same place without you. And red means you had sat through the whole thing and could have received a twoline summary email at the end of it and it has would have been absolutely fine. Green, orange, red. That's it. And the whole point is not to analyze deeply in the moment, but to accumulate data across the week because by Friday, if more than a third of your meetings are read, you already have everything you need to know about where your time is going. So what to do before you even accept the next invitation? And this is actually where the real change starts. It's not the meeting itself or inside the meeting itself, but before you even walk through that door. And it comes down to one simple habit. Ask for an agenda before you accept. And it's not because you're being awkward or difficult, but because you genuinely need to understand whether your presence is going to add anything before you commit a half or of hour of your day to being in that room. A message as simple as happy to join. Could you send over a quick agenda so I can prepare properly? It does the job perfectly. And what you'll quickly find is that about half of the people who invite you haven't really thought through why you really need to be there. And your question makes them think about it. And sometimes they'll realize on their own that you are not needing and withdraw the invitation altogether which saves everyone time and honestly feels like a win all around. Now how to decline without it becoming a whole thing. And this is part of what most managers find the hardest because the fear is always the same. If I say no to this meeting, someone is going to think I'm not engaged, not a team player, not interesting in what's happening around me. And so instead of saying no, they attend everything and quietly resent every single minute of it, which is neither good for them nor particularly useful for anyone else in the room. The phrase I want you to keep close is this. I don't think I'm the right person for this one. Would it be helpful if X joined instead? They're much more closer to this topic than I am. Notice that you're what you're doing here. You're not saying the meeting is pointless and you're not dismissing the person who organized it. You are redirecting helpfully. And that is a genuinely different thing from simply not showing up. And if there's no obvious substitute, you can say, "I'd love to stay across this." And would you be able to share the notes afterwards, which is a boundary, yes, but one delivered with such good intent that it's very hard to take badly. Now, how to leave a meeting that turns out not to need you? Sometimes you accept in good faith and you are already 10 minutes in before it becomes completely obvious that you have nothing meaningful to contribute and no one is going to miss your presence for the rest of the session. And the mistake most managers make in this situation is to stay out of politeness and then mentally check out entirely which is honestly more disrespectful to the people in the room that quietly excusing yourself. What you can do instead is wait for a natural pause and then say, "Call me and without any drama. I can see this is going in a direction where you don't really need me. I'm going to free up your time and let you get on with it. But do send me a note if anything comes up that needs my input. The vast majority of people will appreciate it. And the few who don't will get over it faster than you think." Now, how to spot the meetings that feel important but actually aren't. There are certain types of meetings that carry the feeling of importance without really delivering it. And once you know that what to look for, you will start seeing them everywhere. The standing weekly that no one has ever questioned where you go because it's always been on Thursday at 11:00. the crossf functional update where five departments take turns reporting to each other but no action decision has ever been made. The meeting that exists primarily to prepare for another meeting. The one where if you are completely honest with yourself, your presence is more about being seen than about contributing anything of substance. None of these are inherently evil. They do serve social and political functions within organization and I'm absolutely not going to pretend otherwise. But the question worth asking yourself is whether you are attending because you genuinely add something or because opting out feels risky. And those are two very different reasons that should lead to two very different decisions about how you spend your time. A useful gut check is simply this. If I missed this meeting and asked for the notes, would I actually be worse off in any meaningful way? If the answer is no, then you already know what to do. So, the week is done. You've got your greens, your oranges, and your reds. And now the question is what to actually to do with all of that without feeling overwhelmed or like you need to redesign your entire working life on a Friday afternoon. The answer is to pick just one meeting, one single meeting that scored red consistently across the week and make that your starting point because one change made deliberately and follow through is worth infinitely more than five ch changes that are just attempts. Look at who organizes it and what it actually covers and whether there's a way to stop attending to reduce your frequency or to delegate your slot to someone on your team for whom you would generally be useful development because the bonus there is that you are freeing yourself up and growing someone else at exactly the same time. One meeting, one change. That's all I'm asking because this is isn't about becoming the person who refuses every invitation and starts working alone in a room. This is about stopping the slow quiet drain on the one resource that nobody is going to protect for you but you and finally having the data to do something real and lasting about it. Your time. Right. Before I go, I want to say something with complete conviction. I am so genuinely proud of you for listening to this episode today because most managers know deep down that meetings are eating them alive and they do nothing about it year after year and you are choosing to do something different this week and that is not a small thing. So you should be proud of yourself. Download the PDF from LinkedIn, print it out or keep it on your phone and score your meetings every single day. And by Friday, let that number tell you what it knows because the data will not lie to you. And what it reveals is going to be the beginning of something genuinely important of how you lead and how you protect your energy going forward. Your time is the most precious thing you have and this is completely nonrenewable. So let this week be the week you finally start treating it that way. And if you want to come and share your number with me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I would absolutely love to hear what you discovered. And now you know because I told you. And see you next time. Goodbye.