Would you like to make your meetings far more productive?

Have you ever sat through a meeting wondering why you were there? The kind with no clear agenda, no decisions reached, and the unsettling realisation that the entire hour could have been an email. Most of us have, more often than we'd like to admit. The strange thing is how rarely anyone questions the meeting itself. We just keep showing up.

Most workplaces have at least one person who responds to every email with "let's set up a quick call to discuss." For some, being in meetings has become a way of feeling productive. It's visible. It looks like work. It generates the sensation of doing something, even when nothing is actually being done.

A useful test before booking the next meeting on your calendar:

Could this be handled with an email or a quick message?
Who actually needs to be in the room, not who would feel slighted to be left out?
What's the specific outcome I'm hoping to achieve?

If you can't answer those clearly, the meeting probably shouldn't happen.

The hidden cost

A study by Atlassian found that the average employee attends 62 meetings per month, and considers half of them a waste of time. Half. That's a staggering amount of collective effort being burned on the wrong activity.

Multiply that out across the years of an average career and the numbers become genuinely sobering. Whole working months that could have been spent on focused, meaningful work, lost to discussions that produced nothing.

The good news is that the alternatives have never been better.

Five things that often work better than a meeting

Asynchronous communication. Tools like Slack, Teams, and Trello let you keep everyone updated without having to gather them at the same time. The information lands. People respond when they're ready. Nobody loses an hour to a status update.
Stand-up meetings. Borrowed from agile software development. Short, sharp, focused. Everyone shares quickly, then gets back to work. The standing part isn't decoration. It's a physical reminder to keep things brief.
Time-boxed discussions. If a meeting is genuinely necessary, give it a strict time limit and stick to it. The discipline of a ticking clock changes how people contribute, almost always for the better.
Written updates. For status reports or non-urgent matters, ask people to write rather than gather. Written updates can be absorbed at your own pace, scanned for what matters, and revisited later.
Better decision-making frameworks. Not every decision requires group consensus. Empowering individual people to make decisions, and then trusting them, removes huge amounts of meeting overhead. Many meetings exist purely because nobody felt safe deciding alone.

The goal isn't to eliminate every meeting. Some face-to-face time genuinely matters, for relationship-building, for complex decisions, for the conversations that need to happen in real time. The goal is being deliberate about which meetings deserve to exist, and ruthless about the ones that don't.

When you do need a meeting, run it differently

Edward de Bono, the Maltese physician and psychologist who spent his career thinking about how we think, developed a framework that genuinely changes how meetings feel. He called it the Six Thinking Hats.

The basic idea is simple. In most meetings, everyone is thinking in different modes at once. One person is being optimistic. Another is finding problems. A third is sharing an emotional reaction. A fourth is bringing data. The result is chaos, with people talking past each other and the discussion never quite landing.

De Bono's method gets the whole group thinking in the same mode at the same time. Six modes, represented by six different coloured hats.

White Hat: Information. Just the facts. What do we know? What's missing? What data do we have? Pure information, no interpretation.
Red Hat: Emotions. Gut reactions, feelings, intuitions. No need to justify them. Just acknowledge what's there. This is the hat we usually pretend not to wear, which means it shapes meetings invisibly. Bring it into the open.
Black Hat: Caution. Risks, problems, what could go wrong. The critical evaluation hat. Useful, but only when it's worn at the right time. Worn early, it kills new ideas before they've had a chance.
Yellow Hat: Optimism. Benefits, value, opportunities. The deliberately positive view. What's good about this? Why is it worth pursuing?
Green Hat: Creativity. New ideas, alternatives, what hasn't been tried. The hat for thinking outside the obvious frame.
Blue Hat: Process. Managing the meeting itself. What's the agenda? What hat are we wearing now? What's next? Usually worn by the facilitator.

Why it actually works

The genius of the method isn't the colours. It's that it gets everyone thinking the same way at the same time, which means real progress can actually happen.

It structures the conversation. Instead of people circling endlessly, the meeting moves through clear phases.
It brings out perspectives that usually stay quiet. Quieter or more cautious voices often get drowned out in normal meetings. The hat method gives everyone permission to speak in whichever mode is currently being explored.
It separates ideas from people. When everyone is wearing a black hat, criticism stops feeling personal. When everyone is wearing a yellow hat, optimism doesn't feel naive. The hats give cover for honest contribution.
It encourages real creativity. The green hat gives explicit permission to suggest unconventional ideas without having to defend them yet. That permission changes what people are willing to say.
It produces better decisions. When you've genuinely considered the data, the emotions, the risks, the benefits, and the creative alternatives, you make sharply better choices than when you've just rushed to consensus.

A practical example

Imagine a meeting to decide on a new marketing strategy.

Blue: The facilitator opens with the agenda and explains how the meeting will run.
White: The group looks at the data. Market trends, customer feedback, sales figures. No interpretation yet.
Red: People share gut reactions to the options on the table. No one has to justify their feelings, just put them on record.
Black: The group surfaces every risk and weakness. What might go wrong? Where are the gaps?
Yellow: The same group, now wearing the yellow hat, looks for the opportunities. What could go right? What's genuinely valuable here?
Green: New ideas, alternatives, things nobody has tried. The brainstorming phase, ring-fenced and protected.
Blue: The facilitator summarises, highlights the most important insights, and moves the group towards a decision.

The same meeting, run the normal way, would have spent most of its time with people talking past each other. Run with the hats, it produces an actual outcome.

Reclaiming the calendar

The point of all of this isn't efficiency for its own sake. It's reclaiming the hours that meetings have been quietly stealing, and making sure the meetings that do happen actually produce something worth the time.

Most teams I've worked with could halve their meeting load and lose nothing. Some could halve it and gain back time for the deeper work that actually moves things forward.

The first step is being honest about which meetings on your calendar this week genuinely need to exist. The second is having the courage to cancel the ones that don't.

So if you looked honestly at the meetings in your diary for next week, which ones actually deserve to be there, and which ones would you cancel if you trusted that nothing would fall apart?