SCRIPTS
How to Decline a Meeting With a Co-Worker
A script for saying no when an in-person one-on-one isn’t the best use of your time
In a sea of Slack chatter and overcrowded inboxes, a scheduled face-to-face conversation with a colleague can be a valuable resource — if you actually have things to talk about. Sometimes, though, a one-on-one is more of a waste of time than a productive use of it. Maybe you and this person just don’t have enough to cover to warrant a whole meeting. Maybe it feels more social than useful, a check-in that’s really more of an aimless chat.
Or maybe this meeting ranks 137th on the list of things you want to get done today, in between cleaning the crumbs out of your keyboard and “miscellaneous thinking time.”
“In general, I love a one-on-one,” says Tony Smith, a New York–based journalist who has managed multiple teams over the course of his career. “But strictly speaking, from the standpoint of efficiency, that 30 minutes or an hour might be better served doing other stuff, and it can be frustrating when you’re going home or signing off later than you otherwise would have as a direct result of meeting bloat.”
If you suspect the asker wants face time for its own sake rather than to go over anything specific, you’d be better off…
