The #1 Thing To Remember With Meetings

Software engineering is a inherently collaborative exercise, so every tech company is going to have meetings. The tricky part as a engineer is figuring out how to use them effectively: Navigating meetings incorrectly leads to mountains of wasted time.

Here are the key points from the video:

• Meetings are extremely expensive as it's the most valuable resource people have: Time.
  • This is why you need to be very aware of how productive meetings are for you. Don't just go to them blindly because you are on the meeting invite - This is a common failure mode for earlier-in-career engineers.
• If a meeting has value but isn't fully efficient, consider lowering the frequency or length of the meeting.
• Reflect on the value of every meeting, especially team meetings since they suck up the most time.
• Lean towards deleting meetings or not attending them - If you're unsure what value you got from a meeting, there's a good chance the meeting isn't actually helping you.
  • You can always run an "experiment" here. Remove the meeting from your calendar for a week and see if anything breaks - If the lack of alignment gets bad, you can put the meeting back.

Here's the full 1-hour masterclass on having impactful 1:1 meetings, which is where this clip was taken from.

Related resources:

• Effective Communication Course
• "How can I be more active in meetings and earn the respect of senior engineers?"
• "I have anxiety when speaking up in meetings - how do I overcome this?"