This could have been an email. ~ Everyone 🌍

Meetings are often seen as preventing people from doing meaningful work when really, meetings are processes that (should) enable work. Most companies just don't define what a valuable, meaningful, good meeting looks like.

As a result, your time often isn’t respected (and you may not respect other people's time) the way it should be. You are likely spending at least 60% of your time in meetings of varying quality. You should **spend **at least 60% of your time in deep work, and the meetings that are part of that remaining time should enable you to do those 60% as best you can.

Add to this the additional challenge of digital meetings over video chat. Zoom fatigue is a term that gets thrown around a lot as an argument for less meetings. Anecdotes aside, this phenomenon has been studied and boils down to a few factors:

• Resisting multi-tasking.

• Chronic gaze.

• Stimulus overload (self-view).

• Misattributed delays.

• Poor meeting skills.

So, the best leverage point for efficiency, decision-making, and information flow within any company is to optimize for all of these things. We can sum this up in two categories:

1. **what should/shouldn't be a meeting**, and
2. **what good meetings look like**.

This is important not least because perceived meeting quality (or PMQ) impacts job satisfaction and engagement. Engagement, along with performance, are the top 2 metrics that mark a good employee experience at Juro. So optimizing this is in everyone's interest.

What should/shouldn't be a meeting

What should be a meeting at all? Here is a flowchart to show you how we think about it, taken from Jurors’ suggestions and other charts around the web. Use the overview below as guidance — never rules.

Rule of thumb, if it's a (mostly) one-sided update where no decisions need to be made, it should be asynchronous (e.g. a video recording via Loom):