4 Tips to Shrink the Length of Your Meetings
Meetings take too much time—the best way to counter this is to shrink your meeting lengths and focus those conversations.
#1 Run five–minute meetings
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote a piece about managers who run five-minute-long meetings.
In those meetings, people speak for around 15-30 seconds at a time, providing status updates and asking quick questions.
Many companies have used this method to shrink the length of their meetings down to five to 15 minutes—from 60 minutes or more.
Make sure no one gets too comfortable by standing in a huddle rather than gathering around a meeting table.
#2 Institute No Meeting Days
Another strategy that works for companies is to designate a certain weekday as a No Meeting Day.
This lets everyone spend at least one full, interruption-free day focusing on their most important work.
#3 Aim to end early
If you’ve scheduled a meeting, focus on ending it early, and mention this goal from the get-go.
This lets people focus on that same goal, and makes it taboo for people to speak too long—they’re ruining the chances that the meeting will end early.
Everyone loves the manager who ends meetings early and gives people back some of their time.
#4 Start at weird times
Most meetings start on :00, :15, or :45, because these are the default settings in Outlook.
Starting a meeting at 9:18 not only gets peoples’ attention—but it also ensures no one arrives late.
A similar strategy is to start meetings on the :15, versus at the top of the hour.
This gives people time to get to your meeting or hop on your call when they have a previous appointment that runs late.