I recently made two LinkedIn posts about meetings. I thought it would make sense to reproduce them here for posterity.

Normalize ending meetings early.

If you have scheduled a 1-hour meeting but you are done with your agenda after 30 minutes, there is no need to scramble to think about more things to say. No one will judge you (hopefully) if you just end the meeting at that point and make a more productive use of the remaining time.

Unless you are interviewing a candidate, I guess.

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Another post about meetings:

Larry Page, Google founder, famously wrote a memo on effective meetings. It contains the sentence:

“Attendance in meetings is not a badge of honor.”

This has resonated a lot with me. What it means is: when you realize your presence in a meeting is not needed, you find yourself disconnecting or even checking emails on your phone, then leave. Of course, if you know this before the meeting, then you can just decline the invitation. The hard part is getting out while you are sitting in it.

There are a few techniques to do this, such as simply saying sorry and leaving the room. It takes guts (and psychological safety!) to do that though. I know that some people who are on call have paged themselves to have an excuse to leave a meeting – that may or may not have been me at some point :)