5 Ways to Crush Your Next Meeting

5 Ways to Crush Your Next Meeting

There are around 55 million meetings happening today.  Of those more than a third are wasting time and resources because they do not accomplish their goal.  Does this sound like your last meeting?  Here are some suggestions to crush your next meeting and get the most from your time.

1. Be sure you even need a meeting.  Maybe the presented material lends itself better to a simple email distribution.  Maybe a post in Teams or Slack would be more effective.  Sometimes the asynchronous nature of these mediums is better not only for you but for all those who do not have to gather and waste time when they could simply read the contents at a time of their convenience.
2. Make sure everyone you invite to a meeting really has a need to be there.  When helping executives with effective time management, one of the first things we do is go through their calendar and assume all meetings are canceled.  They then have to come up with the consequence for each cancelation to see if it is really something they need to attend.  Most of the time they attend only because they were invited, not because there was any value in them being in the meeting.  Instead of making all the invitees of your next meeting go through this exercise, why not save them the trouble by making sure them being in the meeting adds value to the overall goal.  If it does not, don’t invite them.
3. Have an agenda that is provided ahead of the actual meeting.  This gives people the ability to come prepared and know what to expect in the meeting.  This agenda should have timeboxed items so that you can keep everyone on track by referring back to the agenda schedule.  Allow time in the beginning for typical greeting and pleasantries and always recap or debrief at the end of the meeting.  Set clear next actions to all in attendance.
4. Don’t let the default time period in your meeting scheduler decide the length of your meetings.  When you create a meeting really think about how long you need in order for the meeting to be productive.  Don’t just go with 30 minutes because that is what Outlook defaults to.  It is inconsiderate of other people’s time when you schedule 30 minutes of time for something that could be accomplished in 15 minutes.  But based on Parkinson’s law, the meeting will still manage to expand to fit the time it is given.     
5. The last and probably most important way to crush your meetings is to always start them on time and do not wait for stragglers.  Do not fill in or summarize for anyone who shows up late.  There is nothing more annoying then someone committing to a meeting that starts 5 to 10 minutes late and goes over the intended time period to throw off the rest of their day because every other meeting they have will have this same unorganized start.  Don’t do this to your team!  It only takes a few times for someone to miss important content because they were late for them to start making more of an effort to get to your meetings on time.  If those people are consistently late to your meetings then they probably do not add value to the meetings and should not be invited.

Hopefully this will give you some things to think about when you create your next meeting.  Here’s hoping you crush it!  What do you think?  Have you used any of these strategies before?  How have you kept your meetings organized.  Leave a comment if you agree or disagree with any of these methods.