How To Avoid Meeting Rabbit Holes and Run Efficient Meetings

Organizations spend roughly 15 percent of their time in meetings—and 71 percent of those meetings are considered unproductive.

And it seems everyone's got an opinion on running workplace meetings more efficiently: Jeff Bezos' believes in writing detailed memos, Jack Dorsey prefers reading Google Docs together and Elon Musk encourages employees to only hold urgent meetings, not regular ones.

While each of those ideas may improve time management (if you consider spending weeks writing book reports for meetings a good use of work time), they miss one of the greatest meeting disruptors of all:

The rabbit hole.

What Are Meeting Rabbit Holes?

Inspired by the opening chapter of Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "going down a rabbit hole" in a workplace meeting means taking a sharp, time-consuming turn away from the primary discussion topic and diving deeply into a tangential subject that may be irrelevant to most of the participants.

While Alice's rabbit hole leads to a strange, surreal and intriguing destination, a meeting rabbit hole often leads to a wasteful, time-inefficient and sometimes highly inconsiderate destination.

Consider the downsides of a meeting discussion veering off-topic and down a rabbit hole:

• Items further down on the agenda are rushed or get no time at all
• Colleagues who prepared to speak don't get their chance to share or shine
• People begin to dread the meetings due to poor time management and may even harbor resentment against colleagues who spoke or asked questions with seemingly little consideration for other meeting points or participants.

You may think a well-constructed agenda is an antidote to meeting inefficiency, but we've all been to meetings with detailed agendas that still ran over.

Preventing rabbit holes requires a direct intervention—but how do you stop people from digging these holes in a way that's courteous, not curt?

5 Ways to Prevent the Dreaded Meeting Rabbit Hole

Here are five tactics to effectively prevent and steer clear of rabbit holes before they derail—and stress out your team.

1. Assign a 'Rabbit Hole Minder'

It's not unusual for workplace meetings to have built-in efficiency roles such as meeting leader and note-taker, so why not add 'rabbit hole minder"' (RHM) to the mix? Chuckle if you will, but I've been to Zoom meetings with an RHM, and all they had to do was occasionally type something like this into chat:

"Maybe we should table this for now or save it for another meeting."

Their recommendation was always immediately followed, and no one was offended by the interruption because the role was established and understood as a meeting norm—as opposed to someone piping up out of the blue and complaining about the meeting going awry or, worse, criticizing someone for taking too much time.

If you do add an RHM to your meetings, make clear to all that the purpose is pro-meeting, not anti-discussion.

2. Proactively Encourage Consideration

Whether you have an RHM or not, start each meeting with a reminder that getting to all the points in the agenda and ensuring every person scheduled to speak has their fair share of time is imperative for keeping the meeting efficient and considerate.

Not getting to a topic is one thing—but giving a colleague two minutes to speak instead of the allotted 12 minutes due to an unnecessary diversion is patently disrespectful.

I've been at the far end of that agenda a few times—and maybe you have, too—getting increasingly concerned about off-topic chatter and feeling like you're the only person in the room noticing those precious minutes tick away.

To avoid that peril, a senior manager or the meeting leader should encourage time-awareness firmly before any meeting discussion takes place.

3. Enforce a Q&A Policy

Sometimes, a rabbit hole is dug not by a long-winded presentation but by what seems like an interminable series of questions. If there are no ground rules in place about questions, even a short run of them can easily blow up the meeting schedule.

An effective Q&A policy can be as simple as saving all questions for the end of the meeting—or at least the end of each agenda point—or limiting questions to one or two per agenda point.

Almost any question asked at a meeting can be asked just as easily later in person, in an email, or in a chat, so limiting them during a meeting in the interest of meeting progress should not be seen as a crime.

4. Create Realistic Agendas

Some agendas are simply too long for the time allotted. There may be too many items, no time set aside for questions or misassumptions and miscommunication about the content. When there's a lot of content to cover, even the shortest and shallowest rabbit hole can throw the entire meeting well off schedule.

To prevent this dilemma, have at least two people familiar with the team culture review meeting agendas in advance. They should assess the agenda content and estimate the time it should take for the content to be presented.

Those reviewers should err on the side of having less time, not more time, because it's certainly more comfortable and appropriate to cut a point or a person before the meeting than during it.

5. Create an Idea 'Parking Lot'

Create a formal shared space—whether on the agenda itself or somewhere else—where new ideas and questions can be housed for later consideration. Such "parking lots" are helpful because they:

• Store all points that were halted or never raised
• Demonstrate respect to the contributors of those points
• Allow the meeting to progress without great delay because the delaying elements are parked elsewhere

But don't let that parking lot become a graveyard. Within a few days, follow up on those ideas and questions with the contributor directly or, if there's time, at another meeting.

In an equitable workplace, no reasonable idea should ever be cast as unworthy. However, there needs to be a balance in meetings between presenting and discussing each idea adequately and covering all points and participants fairly.

With consideration, communication, and some careful planning, that balance can be maintained as meetings move forward so that any holes in the road—rabbit or otherwise—are effectively avoided.

About the Author

Joel Schwartzberg is the senior director of strategic and executive communications for a major American nonprofit and has conducted presentation workshops for clients including American Express, Blue Cross Blue Shield, State Farm Insurance, the Brennan Center for Justice and Comedy Central. The author of The Language of Leadership: How to Engage and Inspire Your Team and Get to the Point! Sharpen Your Message and Make Your Words Matter, he also contributes frequently to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Toastmaster magazine and Inc.com.