📅 How To Have Productive Meetings

Welcome to the twelfth issue of the Software Mastery newsletter.

In this issue, I want to share some thoughts on meetings. If you are working as a software engineer at a tech company, part of your work week is spent in meetings like:

1. Stand-up meetings for project updates.

2. Design meetings for reviewing and discussing approaches for new features or projects.

3. Grooming meetings for reviewing newly created tickets.

4. On-call handoff or postmortem meetings for discussing operations.

5. One-on-ones for knowledge sharing, pair programming, networking, etc.

In my experience, meetings fall into one of two categories:

1. Active Meetings — You actively lead or participate in the discussion.

2. Passive Meetings — You passively listen and/or occasionally speak.

For example, one-on-ones are always active meetings since you are one of the only two people in the meeting. In contrast, demo meetings where someone else presents something are passive meetings.

Productive Active Meetings

For active meetings, my advice is to come in with a goal and leave with action items. Though you might not necessarily achieve your goal, you should know what to aim for.

For example, if I have a one-on-one with my manager to discuss my performance in the past year, I want to understand what I did well and what I could have done better. I want to leave the meeting knowing what I should keep doing this year and to improve.

Here’s another example. If I am leading a design review for a new feature, the goal of the meeting is to get alignment on the approach. If I achieve this goal, I want to leave the meeting understanding what I should do next. If I don’t achieve this goal, I want to know what to do to get alignment.

This tip sounds obvious, but I’ve seen many people (myself included) either come into meetings with no concrete plan or leave without knowing what comes next.

Productive Passive Meetings

For passive meetings, the best option is to not go to them. If you’re showing up to a meeting to listen but aren’t getting any value, it’s a waste of time.

When I first started working full-time, I thought any meeting on my calendar was mandatory. Over time, I learned that this is not necessarily the case.

That said, some meetings require your attendance, even if you won’t participate much.

In these cases, you should either actively listen and take notes or do some shallow work that doesn’t require your full attention (e.g., clearing your inbox, running a slow build, writing some simple unit tests, etc.).

While this is not ideal, it’s better than zoning out for thirty minutes to an hour.

Your Turn!

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter on meetings!

If you take the time to reflect and apply some of the ideas in this newsletter to your meetings, I strongly believe your productivity will increase.

If you have any other tips for dealing with meetings, leave a comment below or reply to this email to let me know!

Until next time,

Sammy