do more with less, effective meetings, productivity, stress free meetings, work performance
Today's post is a guest post by Stephen Weber of Less Meeting. Stephen specialises in making your meetings more productive.
Anyone with a schedule full of meetings and to-do’s knows that each minute counts. Yet, we still find ourselves staying late or coming in early to make up for lost time from the previous day.
With over 3 billion formal meetings in the US alone, you’d be surprised how a few
meeting best practices could really give you some of that wasted time back.
It all starts with proper preparation. How do you typically decide how long to meet for? Research shows that most people set common meeting times based on psychological ease, not practicality.
For example, most calendar software allocates 30 minutes to an hour by default (when creating a new event), but what happens when a meeting could actually be done in 20 or 45 minutes? Most people assume they can simply end earlier and don’t bother to make the simple change, but according to Parkinson’s Law, that extra time becomes wasted.
If you schedule an hour to accomplish a task that could be done in 40 minutes, you will still make use of that full hour to get it done. Leaving valuable time wasted over a simple scheduling error really adds up.
How can we use scheduling to our advantage?
Send out a meeting agenda (with your invite) breaking down each discussion topic and exactly how long it will take.
Example:
Agenda
1) Introduction
(2 minutes)
2) Current State of Project
(10 minutes)
3) Projected State of Project
(20 minutes)
4) Next Steps
(8 minutes)
Schedule each topic based on your objective and dictate how much time it will take for each topic to be covered, not vice versa.
Setting a limit will let the facilitator know exactly how much time they should be dedicating to each topic in order to stay on track. If you have a history of chatty meetings, make sure coworkers are aware of the time limits and use that agenda to stay on schedule.
Finally, make sure to send the agenda out several days in advanced to allow your coworkers time to actually read / prepare for the meeting before it begins.
For more great productivity tips, check out
The Organised Mind.
What are some other tips you’ve found useful for staying on track?
Stephen Weber is a meeting productivity expert at Less Meeting- a web/mobile meeting tool that allows users to set agendas, write meeting minutes, and follow up on action items. Sign up for a free trial today!
image credit:
www.freeimages.co.uk