Extreme Ways to Shorten and Reduce Meetings
I have been in meetings that seem to go on and on. I am sure that you’ve been in one or a couple too. And how we all wish there’s a way for the meeting to be cut short. I know of someone who downloaded an app in his Iphone that gives him fake calls (complete with a person’s name and number). He uses this to escape the (insert expletive here) meeting.
Keeping meetings short is a GIFT. Gina Trapani outlines several ways to keep meetings short. If you have your own, leave me a comment below.
Extreme Ways to Shorten and Reduce Meetings
GINA TRAPANI
6:21 PM Monday July 20, 2009
All managers spend a bigger chunk of their workdays in meetings than they’d like. Meetings interrupt your workflow, eat up hours you could be spending more productively, and evenincrease fatigue. While getting everyone in a room to discuss an issue might be the only way to make a decision, some companies have laid down the law to reduce meetings that waste people’s time.
It goes without saying that a good leader who starts on time and sticks to a firm agenda makes for a productive meeting. Here are a few more extreme techniques for keeping meetings on track.
Count down remaining time with a stopwatch. Meetings that start late and go over are more commonplace than they should be. BusinessWeek reports that large Google meetings stay on time thanks to a visible, ticking clock.
To add a little pressure to keep meetings focused, Google gatherings often feature a giant timer on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic. It’s literally a downloadable timer that runs off a computer and is projected 4 feet tall.
Here’s more on how to run a meeting like Google.
Keep everyone standing. No one’s willing to linger too long on a tangent in a meeting if their feet hurt. Blogger John Trosko said instituting “stand-up” meetings at a Los Angeles-based company he worked at made them more efficient and faster.
Instead of sitting at a traditional conference table, we took the chairs out of the room and ran meetings while standing on our feet. Well, the length of the meetings DRASTICALLY dropped, because people didn’t want to stand for long. Meetings went from 30–60 minutes to roughly 1/2 of that while still delivering meaty content.
Ban distractions. Todd Wilkens at design firm Adaptive Path says that he gets meeting attendees to focus by asking everyone to forgo their laptops, iPhones, and BlackBerries during the meeting. He goes the extra mile to make this happen: he’ll call out folks who are surreptitiously checking email in-meeting, and will even ask everyone to put their mobile devices in a box or on a counter in the corner of the room during the meeting.
Never schedule meetings more than 30 minutes long. At web application development firm 37Signals, meetings rarely happen because they’re considered harmful. But if a meeting is absolutely necessary? Make it no longer than 30 minutes, go in with a very specific issue at hand, and hold the meeting at “the site of the problem” — have the code, design, documents, numbers in front of you. Here’s more from Ryan Singer at 37Signals on making meetings more useful.
Sometimes just keeping good meeting practices front and center during a gathering can help. At tech publisher O’Reilly’s main campus, meeting guidelines are posted on the wall of every conference room.
What are your most effective techniques for keeping meetings short and down to a minimum? Post them in the comments.
