Require Meeting Agendas in Advance

One of the keys to simplicity is clarity. Meetings with no agendas are mediocre at best. “Because it's 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday” is not a valid reason to meet. The agenda should clearly state the purpose of the meeting. It's not enough just to list a subject, such as “this year's budget.” Attendees need to know what they're there to do: get updates? Share information? Give input? Make decisions? The agenda should be specific.

Be bold. Set the ground rule that if there's no agenda set out in advance, the meeting does not happen.

Make It OK to Say No

Jill, a quality manager at a large pharmaceutical company, said, “Everyone's really nice here. No one ever turns down a meeting invite, even if they've got other things going on. Everyone does it, so no one feels comfortable to say no.”

It's easy to get lulled into conformity. But not every meeting needs everybody there. Buck the trend. Once you've established clarity in agendas (see previous section), give permission for your people (and yourself) to decline meeting invites. Your life will thank you for giving it some time back.

Have a Strong Facilitator

Leading a meeting well is harder than it looks. Effective meeting facilitators are skilled at managing the content (what is being discussed) and the process (how it's being discussed).

Just because you're the leader doesn't mean you are always the right person to lead the meeting. You may be better served to have someone else facilitate. This can free you up to fully immerse as a participant.

Avoid Multitasking

If everyone pulls his or her phone or laptop out during a meeting, how much genuine listening is going on? How much useful dialogue is likely to occur? What's happening is not a meeting; it's a pseudo-meeting, where people are just biding their time until it's their turn to report out. They're going through the motions of meeting.

There's one big reason people multitask in meetings. The meetings are of such poor quality already that they don't feel as if they're missing anything. If you design meetings so they're truly valuable, people will appreciate the new norm of powering off devices before you start. Be explicit about your new policy. Some of my clients have even placed baskets by the door for people to leave their devices.

Multitasking becomes especially challenging for people working in a remote setting. If you are going to engage your virtual attendees, you have to find more ways to make the meeting interactive. You may want to consider using video so people can't disappear.

Start Promptly

Your CFO would not stand for you taking 16% of your budget and flushing it down the toilet. Yet, when you start an hour-long meeting ten minutes late, that's exactly what you're doing: 16% of your time is gone.

As a leader, you set the tone. If you tolerate lateness, that's what you'll get. You'll also get resentment from the people who consistently show up on time and feel their time is being wasted.

Have Stand-Up Meetings

There's nothing like challenging gravity to get people to focus. When people stand up, they don't get to relax the way they do in a chair. Not surprisingly, they cut to the chase much more quickly. A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that sit-down meetings were 34% longer than Stand-Up Meetings—with no difference in the quality of decisions made.⁴

Appoint Timekeepers and Scribes

Being the leader doesn't mean doing everything yourself. When you delegate out roles at meetings, not only do you share the load but also you empower people to take responsibility for the quality of the meeting outcome.

It's amazing how many meetings take place where nothing gets written down. A scribe who can capture the essence of what happened is worth his or her weight in gold. Great timekeepers do more than look at their watch. They challenge the group to increase its sense of urgency and to hold fast to boundaries.

Many leaders who've deputized others into these roles have found it to be a huge support. In addition, they're often surprised to find that the people who take on these roles do a better job than they did themselves.

Change the Default Times

There's nothing magical about 30- and 60-minute increments. They are, however, the default settings in iCal and Outlook for meetings. One of the biggest complaints people make about their meeting culture is the stress that comes from back-to-back scheduling. In the course of one second, one meeting ends and the next one starts. Although this works fine on paper, it doesn't work in real life. People may have to travel from one room to the next, dial in to a new conference line or weblink, or use the facilities. They may also need time for a mental break to refocus on to the next subject.

Cyril Parkinson once wrote, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”⁵ Parkinson's law, as it's come to be known, means that if you have an hour scheduled for a meeting, that's how long it will take. Amazingly, if you schedule a 45-minute meeting, that's what people will get used to. Giving people a humane amount of transition time before their next meeting may make you the most popular leader in your organization.

Distribute Materials in Advance

Depending what you're meeting about, you may have reports or other items that people need to review in advance. (“Advance” means at least a day or two—not five minutes before you start.) Make it clear that attendees are expected to spend time going over materials before you meet, rather than use valuable time during the meeting.

In addition, look for ways to cap the volume of preread materials. People are busy. People need enough data to be informed, not overwhelmed. When it comes to prework, less is more. Not only is a three-page synopsis easier to read than a 30-page report, the likelihood of the prework getting done increases exponentially.

Use the Parking Lot

One of the things people hate most about bad meetings is the way they go off on tangents. You thought you were meeting to discuss A, B, and C, but the discussion has veered off into X, Y, and Z. X, Y, and Z may be meaningful topics, but because they were never part of the agenda, what are you supposed to do?

Due to the nature of discussions, tangents happen. But that doesn't mean you should be ruled by them. If you find yourself heading toward X, use a parking lot. Have a flipchart or whiteboard that's titled “Parking Lot” and write X on it. Say, “I hear you talking about X. Let's park X for now, and let's find another time and place where we can really focus on dealing with X.”

People respect leaders who set healthy boundaries. A parking lot is a clever tool to help you acknowledge new ideas without letting the outliers derail your focus.

End the Meeting if It's Going Nowhere

It's hard to admit, but some meetings are just plain useless. Try as you might, you can keep talking around and around a subject, but it's clear that you're not getting any closer to new insights or solutions. Rather than persisting at hitting your head against the wall, just stop.

End early. Pick it up again at a different time and place. In the interim, maybe there's someone or something else that has information that could be relevant. For now, there's no need to stick with it just because you said so.

Follow Up

People don't meet just for meeting's sake, even though it may feel like it at times. Ideally, meetings are catalysts to future action. Because of this meeting, who is going to do what? By when? If it's not measured, it won't be managed.

If you've discussed ideas, but don't make time and place for action steps and follow-up, you've wasted most of your time. Budget 10% to 15% of your time toward the end of a meeting to document next steps. Then, find ways after the meeting to keep these commitments out in the open.

Create One Meeting-Free Day a Week

It turns out the best way to run some meetings is to not meet at all. It's obvious that one of the biggest costs of constantly moving from meeting to meeting is time. However, another huge drawback of being in perpetual meeting mode is that you're robbed of your ability to stay focused on one thing.

A meeting demands more of your cognitive capacity than just the time spent in the meeting. The meeting cycle also includes the preparation time before meeting and the synthesis time afterward. When you're in multiple meetings a day, it's hard to break this cycle of thinking and dedicate mental energy to more complex, long-term project work. A meeting-free day gives you (and your team) the space and time to get to those things that are important, but not urgent.

Many clients I've worked with have used this technique with great success. Manny, an operations manager at a manufacturing organization, said, “Meeting-free Thursdays has given me my life back.” It's especially useful for people who are strong self-starters and like to stay focused on one thing. A word of warning: not everyone functions well with a full day of unstructured time. For people in this camp, it may be more helpful to go with a meeting-free half-day. Try it out, see how it works, and adjust as needed.

Turn Auto-Notifications Off

Your computer has default settings when it arrives. These settings aren't the ones that serve you best. One of those default settings is the one in which your mail program alerts you with a sound and/or a screen that tells you something new has just arrived. Change it—get rid of that alert. Every ping and ding sabotages your concentration and derails your momentum. And while you're changing the defaults on your computer, pull out your smartphone and change those settings as well.

Create Email-Free Time Zones

Irma, an auditor for a financial services firm, agreed to a one-week experiment. For five days, she decided to set up email-free time zones. She changed her way of working so she would process emails only three times a day: two hours after she started working in the morning, once after lunch, and once at the end of the day. “That first morning,” Irma reported, “it was really hard not to open my inbox. I'm so used to doing that first thing when I come in. I felt like a drug addict in withdrawal.”

Irma's description of an addict is not far off. Many people feel compelled to constantly check their devices. Three-quarters of workers report replying to email within an hour or less of receiving it.⁷ That means they're constantly checking their inbox.

Why so often? There's actually a moment of checking the inbox that brings with it intense pleasure. It's a similar moment that someone playing a slot machine experiences just after they pull the arm and before the wheels stop spinning. It's the thrill of anticipation, which releases the chemical dopamine. Dopamine—the hormone of craving—is one of the most addictive chemicals on the planet. It's hard to quit cold turkey.

However, perpetual email checking has its downsides. As was the case with chronic meetings, chronic email checking destroys your focus. In addition, inbox hypervigilance creates stress. Most of the emails in your inbox want something from you—your time, attention, or both. Jumping to view these requests without a thought-through plan of action triggers your fight-or-flight response. Before you know it, you're operating from a false sense of urgency. This urgency not only hurts your performance but also stresses everyone around you who has to work with you.

Just because emails can be sent back and forth in an instant doesn't mean they should. If you reply to others' emails instantly, you set up an expectation that immediate response is the norm. Although this may satisfy the part of your ego that wants to be seen as dutiful and hardworking, it sabotages the part of you that has other things to do. By setting email-free time zones, you can begin to tame the email dragon. Dedicating times of day means you take back control. The dragon only comes out when you say so, and on your own terms. It no longer gets to run the show and wreak havoc on your workday.

Create Norms for Response Times

Another cause of false urgency is the lack of norms for response times. Now, certain jobs and roles need an immediate response. For example, an emergency room doctor works in an environment where the quick decisions she makes can mean life or death.

This is not the case for every role. Think about your own work. Although an immediate reply might be a nice to have, is it a need to have? Create some team norms and rules for response times. What makes sense in your culture? Is it to respond to all emails within 24 hours? Four hours? One hour? When you create and clarify boundaries for people, you free them up to focus on what matters, rather than worry about second-guessing their decisions.

Save as Draft, Delay Delivery, and Send Later

Not only can email be sent and received at lightning speed, it can do so at any time of day, on any day of the week. This is both a blessing and a curse. It creates a tremendous amount of flexibility for where and when you work. At the same time, it can make any distinctions between work and life disappear.

By all means, use the flexibility that email provides to its utmost advantage. For example, if you have small children and want to get home and put them to bed, and then get back to work between 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., go for it.

However, just because those are your optimal working times doesn't mean you should make anyone else work those same hours. As a leader, if you don't set clear expectations, the people who report to you will feel compelled to get back to you. (After all, you're the boss.)

Jill, an executive for a regional airline, thought she had a handle on this practice. She said to me, “I've told my people, I work best at night. I don't expect you to respond to me until the next business day.”

Although Jill's intentions are admirable, she's missing an important piece of the equation. As a leader, your actions carry more weight. Even if you've told people that they don't need to reply right away, just receiving an email from the boss places psychological baggage on your team members. Now, they're thinking about the issue you've written about in your email. Their downtime is not as down as it was before your email arrived.

Instead of sending emails at all hours of the day, you can compose them, and save them as drafts, and send the next day. Or you can opt to delay delivery, so they're not received until a specified time. Either way, it helps put the boundary back between work and life.

Limit CC Recipients and Do Not Reply All

The more people you send emails to, the more emails you're going to get back. Hence, if you want to get fewer emails, send fewer of them. One of the keys to reducing email quantity is limiting CC recipients and not replying to all.

Rick, a salesperson for an auto parts distributor, told me, “Around here, we have serious CC disease. Everyone does it for everything. They're afraid of not having a paper trail. I think we should change the name of the email function from CC to CYA (cover your ass), because that's what it really is.”

Some clients I work with have a rule they can CC no more than three people on an email. They've also become vigilant at asking, “Who really needs to see this?” It isn't that they're withholding valuable information; they're just not overwhelming people with irrelevant information.

They know that fewer emails means getting time back elsewhere. In a study published in the Harvard Business Review, it was concluded that when a team lowered email output by 54%, 10,400 annual worker hours were gained.⁸

Write a Clear Subject Line

The advent of email has brought with it a new sport: subject fishing. It's that game you play when what's currently in the subject box makes no sense, and you have to dive deep and scroll through all of the FW:FW: FW: FYI SEE BELOW to figure out what this content is really supposed to be about. People hate playing this game. It's a giant frustrating waste of time.

However, when I ask groups of leaders to honestly admit if they ever perpetuate the game by forwarding the confusion on to the next innocent bystander, most of the hands in the room go up. They do it because it's easier and quicker for them to do in the moment.

Instead of subject fishing, choose to write (or rewrite) a clear subject line. If your subject line is good, you may not need a whole lot more in the body of your email. Futurethink, Lisa Bodell's innovation consultancy, practices what they preach here and are masters of the great subject line. Many of the emails I receive from them are standalone subject lines.

For example, if Futurethink wants to inquire if I'm available to deliver a session for a client, the subject line reads: Date check: Friday, November 17 full day NYC? That's the entire email. The subject line tells me exactly what I need and how to respond.

Utilize One-Screen Emails

There's a reason Twitter is such a popular social media platform. Its limited character length forces you to get to the point. To make your emails simpler, consider the Twitter model—keeping your emails to one or two sentences. As a rule of thumb, limit your email text so it can all be read on one screen (as read on a standard laptop). Scrolling should not be needed.

The more concise your messaging is, the more likely it will be easily understood. Everyone's attention is scattered today—don't make things harder than they already are. If you have additional information that takes up more than one screen, attach it as a separate document. Then, in your email, briefly explain the purpose of the document.