Solving Email and Meeting Overload in Matrixed Teams

Too many meetings? A new study challenges many things we think we know about meeting overload. Here's what the researchers discovered. 1) Size matters For small teams (under 6 people), "meet when needed" works beautifully. But there's a tipping point: as teams grow larger, flexible scheduling becomes a disaster. With larger teams, someone will almost always want to meet (of course!), leading to constant interruptions. 2) Too few meetings Surprisingly, the study found that teams often suffer more from too few meetings than too many! Workers reported more frustration when they couldn't coordinate (missing crucial alignments) than when they had to attend "unnecessary" meetings. Example: A developer needing input on architecture decisions might waste days going in the wrong direction because they couldn't get timely coordination with colleagues. 3) Smart rules beat simple rules In diverse teams (different roles, productivity levels, schedules), basic rules like "meet every Monday" aren't enough. The research recommends these approaches instead: - Minimum gaps between meetings (e.g., 48 hours of focus time) - Maximum time without meetings (e.g., never go more than 5 days) - Multiple-person approval for new meetings Example: A software team might block off Tuesday/Thursday mornings as "no meeting zones" while requiring at least two developers to agree before scheduling additional meetings. 4) Fixed meetings For larger teams, standing meetings (e.g., every Friday at 3 PM) are remarkably effective. The data shows they never perform worse than 28% below optimal efficiency - making them a reliable choice, especially as teams scale. 5) The Hybrid Sweet Spot The most successful approaches combine: - Protected "quiet time" where meetings are prohibited - Designated "interaction time" when coordination is encouraged - This structured flexibility helps balance individual productivity with team alignment. Quick recap: As your team grows beyond 6-10 people, shift from ad-hoc scheduling to more structured approaches. But don't make them rigid - add smart safeguards to maintain flexibility while preventing both meeting overload and coordination drought. Source: Roels, G., & Corbett, C. J. (2024). Too Many Meetings? Scheduling Rules for Team Coordination. Management Science, 70(12), 8647–8667.

📉 The noise-to-signal ratio: When every message is urgent, nothing is Great leaders aren’t loud. They’re clear. They don’t flood channels. They filter them. But let’s be honest. Somewhere between your team’s 47th “quick update” email and your Slack channel lighting up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, clarity got buried in a landslide of urgency. 🔔 Here’s the uncomfortable truth: In most companies, everything is marked urgent… Which means nothing is. 🧠 What Eisenhower knew (that your inbox forgot) Named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower—who, just to be clear, was juggling World War II, the Cold War, and the literal launching of NASA—not a Q4 marketing deck. He used a dead-simple method to decide what to focus on: Ask two questions: 1. Is it urgent? 2. Is it important? Here’s what he found (and what most of your team hasn’t): Most “urgent” things… aren’t important. And most “important” things… don’t scream for attention. 🗂 The Matrix (no, not the Keanu one) Eisenhower's Matrix divides your chaos into four buckets: 1. Urgent & Important – Do it now (e.g., a regulator calls your mobile. Not ideal.) 2. Important but Not Urgent – Schedule it (e.g., strategic planning. You know, that thing everyone cancels.) 3. Urgent but Not Important – Delegate it (e.g., “Can you jump on a 17-person call to decide logo font weight?” No. You cannot.) 4. Not Urgent & Not Important – Delete it (e.g., your 34th LinkedIn notification today.) 🧭 How great leaders use it (and how you should too) ✅ They batch non-urgent chatter. That’s right—batch it. Email, Slack, updates... set time windows. You’re not a 24/7 drive-thru. ✅ They delegate panic properly. Just because it’s ringing doesn't mean you have to answer it. That’s what teams are for. Also: voicemail. ✅ They delete noise without guilt. Not every ping deserves a reply. Especially the “just checking in 😊” ones. ✅ They protect real urgency like oxygen. The things that actually matter? They focus, act, and move. Because urgency should create motion, not motion sickness. 📌 Bottom line: Be the filter, not the flood Good communication isn’t more messages. It’s fewer decisions left hanging. If your org treats every message like a five-alarm fire, your people will either burn out… or stop reacting entirely. And when everything is urgent, guess what gets ignored? The important stuff. So do your team a favor: Be the filter, not the flood. Be the signal, not the siren. #Leadership #ExecutiveMindset #DecisionMaking #Productivity #Management #Communication

The fastest way to energize your team & unlock innovation? Kill stupid rules. Yes, that’s the actual name of the method: 𝗞𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗽𝗶𝗱 𝗥𝘂𝗹𝗲𝘀 (KSR), a simplification technique developed by Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink. I learned it firsthand when I was the APAC CHRO of Pfizer, where Lisa helped us tackle the complexity that was slowing the whole company down. The shift transformative. We moved from: → Drowning in email → To straight talk & real conversations → Endless meetings → To 30-minute, focused sessions with only the right people → Bloated decks & roadshows → To meaningful management visits → Bottlenecked approvals → To streamlined decision-making It was more than just a productivity hack. It did something even more profound: It changed the company's culture. It helped free up time & focus so the organization could do its most important work: Developing a life-saving Covid vaccine safely, at record speed (248 days vs. years). 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀: As companies grow, complexity creeps in. Old rules linger. Processes that once made sense become friction points, but no one questions them. Suddenly people are too busy navigating bureaucracy to do meaningful work. That’s where KSR comes in. Check out my carousel on how to do it. TL;DR: 1/ Gather your team. Make sure a senior decision-maker is in the room 2/ Brainstorm & capture ideas 3/ Use a simple matrix: Impact vs. Ease of Implementation 4/ Evaluate & discuss as a group which rules should be killed 5/ Kill the rules & follow through Some rules I killed in my own team: → Pre-employment medical exams where not legally required → Irrelevant recurring meetings → My own approval for decisions my team could already make → Tracking team vacations in Excel → Monthly “achievement” reports → And yes… an old HR rule requiring new hires to draw a map to their house (seriously) What made it powerful wasn’t just the exercise. 𝗜𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁. → Simplify for impact → Challenge what no longer serves → Make it easier for your team to do great work The truth is: Complexity kills momentum. Simplicity unlocks creativity. You need the courage to question what’s outdated, irrelevant, or just plain stupid. 𝗕𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝘁. === I'm Rocky Esguerra, Executive Coach and ex-APAC CHRO of P&G, Pfizer and Heineken. I write 4x/week on leadership, management & wellness, based on my lived experience. Follow me and repost this if you found it useful.

It's not a space problem - it's a culture problem. 📊 The data says it all: 🟣 UK: unproductive meetings cost £50 billion a year (LSE). 🟣 HBR: 70% of meetings stop people doing productive work. 🟣 Senior managers spend 23 hours a week in meetings - 8 hours wasted (HBR). 🟣 Microsoft: “Inefficient meetings” = #1 productivity disruptor; “too many meetings” = #3. 🟣 HBR: 83% of meetings on managers’ calendars judged unproductive. 🟣 Atlassian: 72% of employees say inefficient meetings are their biggest drain. 🟣 CIPD: Meetings without clarity, voice, or leader discipline erode performance and wellbeing. 🟣 HBR: 9 out of 10 people daydream in meetings. 🟣 Microsoft: Back-to-back meetings cause measurable stress spikes in the brain. 🟣 Microsoft: 30% of meetings now span multiple time zones (up 8% since 2021); after-8pm meetings are up 16% YoY. 7 fixes for meeting overload 1. Be ruthless Before booking, ask: what if we don’t meet? Categorise: status / tactical / strategic. Stick to < than 8 attendees. Long agenda? Split it. 2. Design for success State clear goals and decisions. As chair, check in: “Is this serving our goal?” Model good behaviour: guide, enforce, encourage. 3. Make hybrid inclusive Balance voices in-room & online. Use collaborative tools (whiteboards, chat). Call in remote participants. Plan with time zones, breaks, buffers. Signal clearly when face-to-face is required. 4. Respect the human system Create psychological safety. Build in breaks; avoid stacking. Cameras on: non-verbals build trust, cut multitasking. 5. Track and adapt Ask: what worked, what didn’t? Kill recurring meetings past their purpose. Circulate action-focused notes, to everyone. 6. Use the right lengths Team: 15–30 mins Brainstorm: 45–60 mins Strategy: 60–90 mins Decision: 2+ hours Retrospective: 30 mins per project week 1:1: 30–60 mins Social check-in: 30–60 mins 7. Add human touches Comfort breaks for meetings >1 hour. Energy check-ins. Let quieter voices submit questions in advance. Leaders, the evidence is clear: meetings are draining time, wellbeing, and £. We work with execs and leadership teams to: 🔵 Audit meeting culture (what’s wasting time, what adds value) 🔵 Redesign for clarity, decisions, and engagement 🔵 Build human-centric habits that cut costs and give people time back for real work Tired of “death by meeting”? Let’s talk. Drop us a message - we’d love to help you reshape your meeting culture. (Data sources in comments as post was too long 😉)

Anyone else suffer from meeting overload? It’s a big deal. Simply put too many meetings means less time available for actual work, plus constantly attending meetings can be mentally draining, and often they simply are not required to accomplish the agenda items. At the same time sometimes it’s unavoidable. No matter where you are in your career, here are a few ways that I tackle this topic so that I can be my best and hold myself accountable to how my time is spent. I take 15 minutes every Friday to look at the week ahead and what is on my calendar. I follow these tips to ensure what is on the calendar should be and that I’m prepared. It ensures that I have a relevant and focused communications approach, and enables me to focus on optimizing productivity, outcomes and impact. 1. Review the meeting agenda. If there’s no agenda I send an email asking for one so you know exactly what you need to prepare for, and can ensure your time is correctly prioritized. You may discover you’re actually not the correct person to even attend. If it’s your meeting, set an agenda because accountability goes both ways. 2. Define desired outcomes. What do you want/need from the meeting to enable you to move forward? Be clear about it with participants so you can work collaboratively towards the goal in the time allotted. 3. Confirm you need the meeting. Meetings should be used for difficult or complex discussions, relationship building, and other topics that can get lost in text-based exchanges. A lot of times though we schedule meetings that we don’t actually require a meeting to accomplish the task at hand. Give ourselves and others back time and get the work done without that meeting. 4. Shorten the meeting duration. Can you cut 15 minutes off your meeting? How about 5? I cut 15 minutes off some of my recurring meetings a month ago. That’s 3 hours back in a week I now have to redirect to high impact work. While you’re at it, do you even need all those recurring meetings? It’s never too early for a calendar spring cleaning. 5. Use meetings for discussion topics, not FYIs. I save a lot of time here. We don’t need to speak to go through FYIs (!) 6. Send a pre-read. The best meetings are when we all prepare for a meaningful conversation. If the topic is a meaty one, send a pre-read so participants arrive with a common foundation on the topic and you can all jump straight into the discussion and objectives at hand. 7. Decline a meeting. There’s nothing wrong with declining. Perhaps you’re not the right person to attend, or there is already another team member participating, or you don’t have bandwidth to prepare. Whatever the reason, saying no is ok. What actions do you take to ensure the meetings on your calendar are where you should spend your time? It’s a big topic that we can all benefit from, please share your tips in the comments ⤵️ #careertips #productivity #futureofwork

Excessive amounts of video meetings are taking a toll—not just on our ability to do concentrative work, but also on our sense of interpersonal connection and capacity for meaningful, spontaneous, in-person dialogue. From our research, conversations with podcast/webinar guests, and personal experience, here are my top three recommendations for addressing meeting overload: 1. Encourage employees to block in-office time free of meetings. I suggest that at least 50% of time spent in the office should be protected from scheduled meetings. Remember: people value calendar flexibility (93%) even more than location flexibility (81%). If you want employees to show up in person, give them more autonomy over how they spend that time. 2. Ask managers to co-create better communication norms with their teams. Encourage team discussions about when to use email, chat (Teams/Slack), text/WhatsApp, phone calls, or in-person conversations instead of defaulting to video meetings. For my team, we’ve cut standing meetings, increased in-person gatherings, and now resolve many issues with a quick call or async message. (Ten minutes on the phone often beats 30 on a video call.) 3. Reassess standing meetings—frequency, duration, and participants. Meetings often take on a life of their own. Ask, "Are we call still clear on the purpose of this meeting, and who should be included?" Simply making some attendees optional can go a long way in reducing unnecessary load. Oh, and I hope it goes without saying, the design of the office space itself should be used to not only support tech, but to counter-balance the negative effects of it by building connection and relationships (Relationship-based Work). #hybrid #distributed #videofatigue #employeewellbeing #employeewellness #meetings #employeeengagement https://lnkd.in/eDpXuEgu

As an RVP at a rapidly scaling SaaS company 3 years ago, I faced 3 crushing problems: 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗕𝗟𝗘𝗠 𝟭: 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱 • 100's of "urgent" emails demanding immediate attention • Constant Slack notifications disrupting deep work • Phone calls interrupting any moment of focus 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗕𝗟𝗘𝗠 𝟮: 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗼𝘀 • Back-to-back meetings from morning until evening • No buffer time to process information or prepare • Strategic work pushed to nights and weekends 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗕𝗟𝗘𝗠 𝟯: 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 • Perpetual fire-fighting instead of proactive management • Team relying on my input for every decision • Unable to focus on high-leverage activities The cost? Burning out and on the verge of hitting the "eject" button. Instead, I spent the next year creating targeted "mini-systems" to address each problem: 𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Developed filtering protocols, planned processing times, and automation workflows that cut email time by 70% 𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁: Created a meeting matrix template that eliminated 25% of recurring meetings 𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽: Built delegation frameworks that reduced escalations and presented growth opportunities for the team. The results were dramatic: • 10+ hours reclaimed weekly • More time for strategic projects • Less stressed and more time with family I started documenting these mini-systems in my weekly newsletter, The Systematic Sales Leader. Here's a recent issue if you care to check it out: 6 Steps to Inbox Zero For Sales Leaders (Even with 100+ Daily Emails) -> https://lnkd.in/e_a9SP4W

🚨 We’re in a HOW-TO-WORK crisis. What does this mean, and what can we do about it? Annie Dean from Atlassian jut recently pointed this out again 👍🏼🙏🏼 The core issue? We’re using synchronous time to pass on information – a task that could be done better through asynchronous communication. 📲 Too many meetings are filled with updates, not real collaboration or creative work, leading to meeting overload, drained focus, and lost productivity. In our work, we see this problem across industries. In a recent session we facilitated at the HR Inside Summit with Anna Dettlaff, only one out of 100 HR managers had received formal training in meeting facilitation. So, while meetings are essential, they also need to be purpose-driven and led with intention. 💡 Here’s what managers can do right now: 1. Shift Information Sharing Asynchronously: Share updates in writing beforehand, freeing up meeting time for genuine dialogue. 2. Set Clear Agendas and Objectives: Every meeting should start with a purpose and aim to accomplish a specific goal. 3. Limit Meeting Frequency: Avoid meetings unless they’re truly necessary. Protect your team’s focus time. 🏢 For organizations, here are three steps to consider: Promote Asynchronous Communication Tools: Equip your teams with tools that make sharing information easy and accessible outside of live meetings. Audit and Reduce Meeting Load: Regularly evaluate meeting schedules and eliminate meetings without a clear purpose. Provide Meeting Facilitation Training: We need meetings, but they must be structured and facilitated well to maximize impact. We’re currently running a program for a client focused on asynchronous communication, with one module dedicated entirely to written communication skills – because clarity and precision make all the difference. 📝 👏 Applause to the organizations that have already started reducing unnecessary meetings, giving their teams the gift of time for focused work. Let’s make synchronous time count!