How to spend less time in meetings

productivity
Written By Christian Wattig
Image by charlesdeluvio via Unsplash

Spending too much time in meetings is risky. That’s because it robs you of the opportunity to take a step back and look at your responsibilities from a different angle. At best, you lose out on out-of-the-box ideas. Worst case, you won’t get out of firefighting mode, because you lack the time to prevent fires from happening in the first place.

Here are 4 ways to address this:

Prevent endless discussions without decisions

Do you have meetings where the objective was to make an important business decision, but all people do is talk? Share meeting notes afterward (writing sharpens thinking) and use McKinsey's DARE framework to remedy this. Assign the following roles upfront:

D eciders

A dvisers

R ecommenders

E xecuters

I recently wrote a post that goes in-depth about using the DARE framework. The link is in the comments below.

Avoid "Parkinson's Law” of overly long meetings

Did you ever wonder why so many meetings take EXACTLY 30 or 60 minutes? Parkinson's Law states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Try scheduling 15 or 20-minute meetings. You will be surprised how much you can achieve in this amount of time. Not only will the discussion automatically focus on what matters most, but people are also more likely to make decisions when there is some pressure.

Create pre-reads to skip presentations

Did you prepare a lengthy PowerPoint deck for a recommendation on a new product launch or simply about the financial performance of the last quarter?

Consider sharing it as a pre-read with all meeting attendees. Then, only discuss questions about the material you shared in the meeting. You'll likely be able to cut the meeting time in half and still get more out of it since people had time to process.

Never meet to share information

Oral communication is less efficient than writing when it comes to information sharing. That's because writing tends to be more thought through and concise. It saves time for the reader, and it also helps the writer reevaluate their points and strengthen their arguments. So try sending well-crafted emails and meet only if there are follow-up questions.

But here is a critical watch-out: Don't use email for sharing information that may cause an emotional reaction (constructive feedback, disagreement, etc.)

Instead, always do that face-to-face or at least over a phone call to make sure you can see how it's understood and respond accordingly.

Christian Wattig
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