Improve work life balance by managing your meetings better

Imagine this...it is Friday evening. You are almost done for the day and ready to sign off for the weekend. You get a slack call from your manager asking for status of a competitive study. First you get confused and then realize that your manager was counting on your to complete it this week. Now, you are in a fix. You say that you are working on it and will get it ready soon. You end the call. You have no option but to cancel some of your evening and weekend plans to complete the competitive study. All of this could have been avoided if you sent a summary with action items and timeline after your previous 1-1 with your manager.  

Everyone wants a better work life balance. If you are still stressed and anxious about a work task after you signed off for the day, then you are doing something wrong. In my experience, anxiety comes when there is ambiguity or lack of understanding of what needs to be done and how much effort is needed. 

Product managers and others involved in tech usually attend several meetings in a day. These meetings could be with your team members with whom you collaborate, 1-1 with your manager where you discuss your ongoing tasks or with customers/partners where you gather requirements and share roadmap. While having a clear agenda is critical for a successful meeting, it is even more important to document the meeting outcomes and gather the action items.

Let's say you neither capture action items nor send a summary after the meeting. Here are the risks you run into:

• Either you or others have misunderstanding what needs to be done and who is responsible for it
• You spend your cycles on the wrong thing
• You get the timeline wrong

All of these risks may put you in a tough spot where you need to deliver something in a tight timeline and your work life balance goes for a toss. 

This is not rocket science. Here is a simple checklist to manage your meeting better:

• Set agenda in your every meeting invite. Ask for agenda in meetings set by others
• Be a scribe or request for a scribe to note down the meeting summary and action items
• For each action item, note down the responsible person and the expected timeline
• Discuss a follow-up date and actually follow-up to make sure everyone is making progress
• Just take action without delay - remember famous Jeff Bezos quote that stress does not come hard work but from inaction

There may be some unexpected workload beyond your control that may impact your work life balance but we can all do ourselves a favor and manage our meetings better so that we can really sign off from work and focus on personal life an family without feeling anxious about work.

Please comment and share how you manage your meetings and maintain your work life balance.