Episode 62

Meetings: No. 1 Time-Waster at the Office | E62 Darren Chait

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the working world, you probably know how much meetings can consume the work week.

I’m crazy and I actually track this metric. On average, I’ve spent 9.4 hours a week in meetings or 23% of my week.

Meetings aren’t going anywhere. They seem to be the default modality of getting things done and I have to agree, meetings make sense for some situations.

If I’m going to continue to spend a ¼ of my career in meetings, I want to be good at running them. Surprisingly, there are a lot of effective ways to have better meetings.

Someone that knows a lot about this subject is today’s guest, Darren Chait.

In 2016, Darren co-founded the company Hugo which is on a mission to make every meeting worth it. The product started as a simple Slack plug-in and transformed into a connected meeting notes platform.

You’ll hear more about Darren’s story in this episode along with many actionable takeaways including how to use asynchronous work to limit meetings, how to take better meeting notes, and answering the question, “do we need a meeting?”, with the 3 Ds: decisions, discussion, and debate.

Key Takeaways:

[1:33] Opening for Justin Trudeau in front of 29K people

[5:50] Why being a corporate lawyer made Darren the perfect person to solve how to have better meetings

[9:25] The difference between being a corporate lawyer and a tech founder

[13:14] Using the 3 Ds to evaluate when should you have a meeting

[17:26] The 4-hour meeting week

[20:26] How to decide who to invite

[24:52] The benefits of asynchronous work

[28:52] How to take better meeting notes

[41:13] Using a parking lot to limit off-topic discussion during a meeting

[44:29] Decision journal

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