Supermarket Meeting: The Secret to Cutting Down Useless Meetings

Meetings. Whoever you are, I’m sure this word brings an emotional response.

Maybe you see them as a way to reach agreement, maybe you hate them with a passion, maybe you view them as a necessary evil. Maybe you even see them as a welcome break in your workday, maybe you think your reports see them like a welcome break.

Over the years, I’ve experienced meetings across the entire spectrum of quality, usefulness, and engagement. Some of my career bests have happened in meetings, and so have some of my worst moments.

The main rule I’ve developed for meetings is simple: When you’re there, be present.

That means no browsing, no Slack, no coding while the meeting lasts. If the meeting is bad, you have three options: actively make it better, call it out, or just leave. But when I’m there, I want to use the time as effectively as possible.

The Supermarket Over the Specialized Shop

When I plan my week or day, I want meetings to use the time they’re scheduled for—not more, not less. I dislike going overtime just as much as I dislike when the host suddenly ‘gives me 20 minutes back.’ On the same note, it’s annoying to receive a cancellation email for lack of topics just an hour before the start of a weekly meeting.

So when someone suggested a new meeting for a quite specific topic, I shared my concerns. Maybe it would work for the first two three sessions, but eventually, the topics would dry up, and the meeting would die out. Keeping a recurring meeting alive and interesting requires—surprisingly—a lot of work.

Then I realized we already have some recurring meetings that sometimes end sooner and sometimes get cancelled. It would be much better to expand their purpose to allow related topics. This way, we ensure that the allocated time gets fully used before starting anything new. By making meetings more saturated with diverse topics, we maximize their value.

A Supermarket Meeting is a consolidated approach to recurring meetings, where diverse topics are discussed in one weekly session, similar to how you’d buy various items in one trip to the supermarket. Instead of creating multiple specialized meetings for different subjects, a supermarket meeting gathers all related discussions into a single, regular time slot. This maximizes productivity, ensures efficient use of time, and keeps meetings engaging and relevant.

It’s like a supermarket visit where you buy all your groceries at once, instead of going to specialized shops—baker’s on Mondays, butcher’s on Tuesdays, and a wine shop on Fridays. One meeting, every week, same time, diverse topics.

A New Approach to Meetings

From now on, I plan to use a single weekly meeting as a “supermarket” for discussing anything relevant to Tech. A GraphQL schema question? Bring it on! Kafka learnings from your previous job? Sure! DataDog feeding itself quirk? Our inner geeks love that!

Then, if (or should I write iff?) we often find we don’t have enough time to cover everything, or that some areas would benefit from their own meeting, we’ll create a new slot.

I’m sure this approach will lead to more engaging meetings while adding some predictability to our schedules. Win, win.