Meetings and email now consume two full days a week for many knowledge workers, according to recent data collected by Microsoft tracking customers’ use of its Office applications. Add chat programs, and 57% of the workweek is spent communicating with co-workers, while the remainder is spent on heads-down work in programs such as Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
Tell us stories about how little time we have for our ‘real jobs’ and ‘real work’. But it’s a mistake to separate email and meetings from actual work. Meeting with colleagues—talking, discussing, brainstorming, making decisions—it’s all part of our job. This is all real work.
And if we accept that they’re a core part of many jobs, we can take them seriously to get better at them. If we deny it, we give ourselves license to keep doing them badly, trapping ourselves in a doom loop where useless emails and pointless meetings take up too much of our time.
If you feel that meetings are “not your real job,” it lets you slouch or attend with half-heartedness. Poorly written letters that confuse people or cause resentment.
And if managers accept the idea that email and meetings are somehow fake work—despite the fact that the further up the chain of command they are, the more time they’re spending in meetings—they’re likely to overwork other tasks. Will assign.
No matter how high or low you are in the hierarchy, email and chat apps are real work. These tools shape most business interactions; They are how we communicate priorities and persuade each other. They can help us increase our political capital or ruin it.
Taking email seriously improves using it. Skilled reporters use subject lines strategically and get straight to the point, not in the fifth paragraph. They don’t keep ‘cc’ recipients that don’t need to be on the chain. They compensate for the inherently cold tone of the email by making some effort to convey warmth.
Same goes for meetings. Running a good meeting takes skill – to prepare an agenda, to invite the right people, to keep the discussion on target, to delegate tasks at the end. Being a good meeting participant also takes some effort—to be on time, to be willing to listen, and to discuss. If everyone had made that effort, we would undoubtedly have more valuable meetings and fewer of them. Part of the problem may be that we mistakenly view attending meetings as passive. Yet if you were presenting at a meeting and had taken the time to prepare and rehearse the PowerPoint slides, this would clearly be real work. Why is it less important to listen to someone else’s presentation?
Similarly, email may not seem like real work because we see it as a means of responding to people’s requests and needs. We are not in control of the flood. Messages bombard us, and we swatt them back like so many swarming mosquitoes. Microsoft’s proposed solution — let AI take notes so employees who miss meetings can be found — seems designed to sell AI products without solving the problem. The problem with unfocused, agenda-less meetings isn’t the lack of transcripts!
I also doubt the company’s belief that time spent in PowerPoint, Excel, and Word is inherently more valuable than time spent in Outlook and Teams. Yes, people need time to focus on tasks. But they also need help and input from their allies. I’d like to see more organizations value helpfulness, rather than push employees to rely on AI to get more done alone. Many of us are already very lonely, including at work.
Once managers accept that email and meetings are real work, the next logical step is to right-size the heads-down assignments to fit a typical workday. If someone is given 40 hours to do personal work – to make music, to write code, to parse data – but spends 20 hours on meetings and email, well, that’s 60 hours of work. It’s week. No wonder so many people resent the obstructions that used to prevent them from doing all this during regular office hours. For organizations suffering from communication overload, leaders can help create new norms. If they protected the valuable resource of employees’ attention as diligently as they managed their profit and loss statements, they could schedule meetings at certain times of the day to give employees uninterrupted time to focus on other work. Can be limited to certain times or days of the week. They may decide to eliminate some low-value projects so that employees have time to answer emails during the day instead of at night.
No fairy AI godmother is going to show up and save us from meaningless meetings and excessive email. Fortunately, we can manage it ourselves.
©Bloomberg
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