Got a lot of meetings? Yeah, me too.

Meetings aren’t always bad – in fact, they can be incredibly valuable ways to collaborate or make key decisions. Earlier this year, I wrote a post about how you can improve every meeting. Today is all about evaluating your rituals and figuring out what to do next.

“Rituals” are effectively meetings that happen on a recurring basis. This might be things like standups, cross-departmental syncs, team meetings, or anything else that occurs at regular intervals.

⭐️ Value and effort.

The simplest audit you can do for your meetings is to rank them on value and effort.

Value is just that: how valuable the meeting is. A meeting might have value for many reasons, including:

• You learn key information in a way you can’t otherwise

• You solidify relationships with teammates/others

• You solve difficult problems

Effort is about how much time and prep goes into the meeting. This might include activities like:

• Pre-reading or pre-writing

• Running calculations, checking dashboards, or gathering data

• Having other meetings so that you can have this meeting

List out all of your rituals and give them a simple value and effort score. I just use a three-point scale: Low/Medium/High. For example:

✨ Taking action.

Now that you know the value and effort for all of your rituals, you can start to consider what would make them better – or which ones you can cut entirely. Here are some ways you can think about the scores:

• High value / Low effort: This sounds like it’s working well! It probably doesn’t need much extra attention.

• High value / High effort: Consider if the value is because of the effort. (eg. a meeting can become high-value discussion because every participant does lengthy pre-reading.) Is there a way you can keep the value high while reducing the effort to a medium?

• Medium value / Low effort: Consider if the value can increase if the effort increases.

• Low value / Low effort: Can this meeting be scrapped entirely?

• Low value / High effort: Can this meeting become async? Or can it be scrapped?

You can also do this exercise in teams – or if you’re willing to make it into a big project, you can facilitate it across a wider part of the business. This can be helpful because:

• Sometimes people will rate value/effort differently to you – maybe effort is uneven for all participants, or the value ranges.

• It gets everyone thinking about the purpose of meetings so that they can use them more effectively.

• It’ll help you get more buy-in for making changes to rituals that might have been in place for a long time.

You should audit your meetings at least annually, because things that were once valuable aren’t valuable forever. But if you’re in a space where things are changing frequently, then you can definitely do this more frequently!