In his book Slow Productivity, Cal Newport encourages us to more fully account for the “overhead tax” that comes with any new goal or project:
In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility.
The meetings that spin up from too many priorities could be today’s topic, but I actually want to zoom in further on what I’m calling meeting overhead:
Meeting overhead: the work you implicitly commit to by sending that easy calendar invitation, if you want the meeting to be a good use of everyone’s time: inviting the right people, preparing them to participate, clarifying objectives, designing the agenda, and organizing next steps after the meeting. |
Skipping meeting overhead does not eliminate the work. It either reduces the quality of the meeting or creates more work later.
You might be thinking, “Easy solution. Just don’t do those things.” It’s tempting to reduce the meeting overhead by not doing that work, but ultimately that meeting is going to cost you in other ways.
Imagine you want to hang a new bookshelf. You could get out your level, drill, stud finder and measuring tape. Or you could get a hammer and start knocking on the wall to find a stud. It’s certainly quicker and you can hang a shelf that way. But if your wall ends up full of holes and the shelf isn’t level, centered, or stable, you’ve created more work for yourself. You eventually have to patch the wall and re-hang the shelf.
Meeting overhead is the same way. You could skip the preparation and probably have an OK meeting, but you may not use the time as well, and you may have to revisit the same conversation later. Skipping the overhead rarely saves time. It usually moves the cost somewhere else.
One day a couple of weeks ago, I had four 30- to 60-minute calls on my calendar. What else did I accomplish that day?
I prepared for those meetings. I read the pre-work and notes from last time, prepared questions, and organized the documents I would need to reference.
I sent detailed follow-up emails for two of the four meetings.
The other two follow-ups took up part of the following day.
Those four calls did not take four hours. They consumed most of one day, with some of the work spilling into the next.
That could still be a productive use of my time if those meetings focused on priority work and moved it forward. The problem is that many meetings do not meet both criteria.
An earlier version of me would have scheduled several other business-critical tasks for that day, then worked long hours trying to complete those tasks and the meeting overhead I had not accounted for.
I was planning for the time in meetings, but not for the work required to make them useful.
Sound familiar?
If a meeting is worth having, its overhead is worth planning for. Here are three ways to do that:
-
Before scheduling or accepting a meeting, make sure it maps to a priority, then account for its full cost.
- Ask: “Does this meeting relate to one of my priorities?” and “Do I actually have the capacity for everything this meeting will add to my plate?”
- If not, see if you can push back the meeting or decline it before you implicitly commit to the meeting overhead.
- Block time for prep and follow-up. Add a minimum of 10 minutes sometime before and sometime after each meeting for prep and follow-up. Or batch it: schedule a daily “meeting prep and follow-up” block for yourself. Use AI tools or a regular planning ritual to make that habit more consistent.
-
Lower the bar for yourself. I do not mean lower the bar on quality or skip overhead tasks; I mean reconsider what you have to do by when. Consider:
- What meeting overhead can you delegate to teammates or AI tools?
- Do you actually need perfect slides for this one, or could a short memo or Loom video suffice?
- Can your follow-up happen in multiple stages: perhaps a short email today and a longer summary by end of week?
The true cost of a meeting is much higher than its slot on your calendar, so ask yourself:
What’s one upcoming meeting where I haven’t fully accounted for meeting overhead?
Then put all the overhead tasks on your list and block time on your calendar before and after to do those tasks.
