The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ““Done!”” pod­cast:

The entire meet­ing in pre­served form

After the meet­ing, you have access to the record­ing (if the meet­ing orga­niz­er heed­ed the reminder to record the meet­ing that the orga­niz­er gets short­ly before it starts), the tran­script, and pos­si­bly addi­tion­al meet­ing materials.

It’s prac­ti­cal, because if you don’t have room to pri­or­i­tize attend­ing the meet­ing, you can still be ​“a fly on the wall” in the room, albeit not in real time, but after­wards. It is, for exam­ple, per­fect for those meet­ings where the orga­niz­er thinks that ​“it might be good” in gen­er­al for you to be there.

You get to have it both ways

But if I were you, I’d use the fea­ture with cau­tion. Even if you’re tempt­ed to click ​“fol­low” and there­by both have your cake and eat it too by skip­ping the meet­ing with­out miss­ing it, you’re giv­ing your­self a future task to make time for. After the meet­ing, when you real­ize it has tak­en place, you need to set aside time to under­stand what was dis­cussed and what the par­tic­i­pants decid­ed. Doing that takes less time than attend­ing the meet­ing, but it still takes time.

Avoid the meet­ing pile

There’s a risk you’ll click ​“fol­low” on cer­tain meet­ings you would pre­vi­ous­ly have accept­ed because they’re still valu­able for you to take in, but you build a moun­tain of past meet­ings you strug­gle to find time to go through. You did save time, but you miss some essen­tials you would oth­er­wise have received right away. You also miss the chance to con­tribute to the meet­ing and actu­al­ly influ­ence the outcome.

Do this

1. Next time you’re invit­ed to a meet­ing, see if there’s also a ​“fol­low” but­ton in the invi­ta­tion. If it’s not there yet, it’s undoubt­ed­ly on its way to your Out­look, so hang in there.
2. Before you click ​“fol­low” (if that seems like the right choice for this invi­ta­tion), assume that with that click you’re also giv­ing your­self a to-do task to lat­er go through the meet­ing, which, say, takes 15 min­utes to complete.
3. How about right away, imme­di­ate­ly after the ​“fol­low” click, adding the to-do task to your to-do list so it’s eas­i­er to remem­ber to review the meet­ing you skipped? Copy the meet­ing link and paste it into the task so you can quick­ly and eas­i­ly find the right meet­ing when it’s time.

Time used more efficiently

If you fol­low meet­ings you’re unsure about attend­ing but still want to be updat­ed on, you’ll waste less unnec­es­sary meet­ing time than before. You’ll be freer to use your time for the tasks that mat­ter most, whether they’re meet­ings or not, and you’ll par­tic­i­pate more whole­heart­ed­ly in the meet­ings you actu­al­ly accept.

If, already at the ​“fol­low” click, you fac­tor in that you’ll need to set aside time to review the meet­ing after­wards, you avoid end­ing up with a pile of old meet­ings hang­ing over you and stress­ing you out. Instead, you’ll be more in sync and feel that your work­weeks come together.

How do you do it?

Have you used the ​“fol­low a meet­ing” fea­ture in Out­look? What do you think of it? Please write to me and tell me. I’m curi­ous to hear.

If you have a col­league who you think should know both about the fea­ture and about how I describe approach­ing it here, tell this col­league about this tip, because the more peo­ple around us who work in a struc­tured way, the smoother everyone’s work­days become.

(Do you some­times feel like too much of your time goes to meet­ings? Maybe you don’t actu­al­ly need to attend all of them. Read more here about hav­ing few­er meet­ings by pri­or­i­tiz­ing accu­rate­ly!)