Tip 15

Maximize Meetings

Long, pointless meetings—a major complaint across every single industry—are among the worst in business habits because they kill productivity two ways: they waste time and kill morale. Instead of getting important work done, entire offices are packed into rooms, often for no good reason.

It would be silly to suggest we can do away with meetings altogether. After all, it’s the synergy created from combining our thoughts and ideas that allows most projects to succeed. We just need to go about them efficiently; otherwise, they can be a drag on everyone’s time and energy.

Here are some techniques to make your meetings shorter and more worthwhile:

• Hold fewer meetings. Lots of meetings are unnecessary. Eliminate the unproductive ones from your calendar.

• Start them off on the right foot. If you are leading or chairing the meeting, be clear about what you want to accomplish. The clearer your vision or mission for the time, the more likely you are to achieve it.

• Set shorter agendas. Meetings tend to fill available time. So, if you set aside an hour to go over a new initiative, it’s likely to take at least that long. On the other hand, if you make it clear that you only expect things to go on for 15 minutes, there’s a much greater chance you will get to the point faster.

• Schedule them back to back. By having another meeting to go to, you give yourself (and any other parties) a deadline to wrap things up.

• Go public. Coffee shops and other public locales can make for great places to meet because you’re less likely to be interrupted by your staff, the office phone, or other distractions you might have in your workspace. Just be sure the time you spend getting away doesn’t outweigh the minutes saved.

On an average day, there are 17 million meetings in America. —Donald Whetmore, Productivity Institute