Leave your meetings (TLP 2024w38)

I think we need to normalise leaving meetings that are wasting your time. Notes: Last week, I attended a workshop that had many people in attendance. Like most such workshops, there was a minority of people contributing, while the majority was passively listening, at least I hoped they were listening. In the first hour one of the attendees, an engineer, quietly and without fuss left the meeting and never came back. He clearing decided the meeting was not relevant to him, so he simply left. He done the right thing as he needed to get back to actual work, and as his manager it got me thinking about why this was a good thing. I think we need to normalise this behaviour. When people organise such meetings, they are tempted to pull in too many people, just to build out an audience. For the attendees, they feel obligated to attend, even if it's not relevant to them. So they turn up but remain passive: this is basically a waste of their time. Unless you are actively contributing to a meeting, you have no busy being there. Meetings should be full of drivers, not passengers. I have now told my entire team they have my permission to leave any meeting that is not relevant to them. Just leave if it's wasting your time. On the flip side, I will no longer accept those engineers complaining to me that they could not complete their work because they had to attend too many meetings: I am literally asking them to leave those meetings, and get back to work. As a leader, attending meetings is my work: this is how I gain insights and feedback, and give direction. I have to turn up. For anyone who is not a leader however, they need to be aggressively trying to reduce the amount of meetings they attend. Just get up, walk out, and tell anyone who tries to stop you that your manager said it's okay to leave, see you. What I am working on this week: Moved greppr.org to a powerful physical server: 32 core i9, 64GB of DDRM5 RAM, 2x 2TB SSDs in a mirrored RAID 1 configuration. The search and indexing performance has improved dramatically, check it out! Notes and subscription links are here: https://techleader.pro/a/661-Leave-your-meetings-(TLP-2024w38)