Want an extra 40 hours a year? Change the way you run your meetings!

Today’s post is a really easy one…

          Don’t have one-hour meetings.

And that’s it.

You see, most meetings last 30 or 60 minutes.

Why?

Two reasons – because:

1. Outlook is split into 30-minutes chunks, and
2. that’s how long they’ve always taken

Two dreadful reasons for deciding how long a meeting should last.

And it gets worse. Have ten people in your meeting? That means your meeting cost ten hours of a resource. Was it really worth that?

But there’s a very easy way to fix this.

Stop saying “the meeting will last one hour.”

Instead: “the meeting will last a maximum of 45 minutes.”

That way, people arrive thinking:

• It finishes in only 45 minutes, so we’d better crack on; and
• Since you said “a maximum of”, if we work efficiently, we’ll finish early

Do this for just one meeting every day, and you save over an hour every week.

Do this every week, and that’s 40-50 hours a year.

That’s an entire working week.

And, because you’d have spent that week in meetings, what a rubbish week it would’ve been!

Even better – if you want to save more than one week, make these changes too:

• Invite fewer people. Remember, you can always send some people your Actions Arising – they don’t all need to attend everything
• Have fewer agenda items
• Vary something. Meetings are often too long because of the habits we’ve let ourselves get into. You know the type of thing – every Monday, we meet at 10-11am, in the same room, sitting in the same chairs, discussing the same stuff. So, break your habits and do something different. Change the venue, start time, duration, seating arrangement, chairperson, agenda order… anything to shake things up
• Replace ‘Any Other Business’ (often a pointless chat) with ‘Actions Arising’ (ensures there are some)
• Don’t automatically make them the ‘45 minutes’ I mentioned above. If something can be done in ten minutes, book it in ten minutes

All these ideas are pretty simple.

But the easiest of all is to stop having one-hour meetings.

Right now.

Action point

Look at today’s meetings. What will you do to shorten at least one of them?

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Written by NativeEnglish

Native English Spain is dedicated to make learning English simple, fun and affordable for Spanish people.