How to Run Effective Meetings
10 golden rules for high-leverage meetings
You don’t need to shun meetings to be productive.
A well-run meeting is a high-leverage activity, sparking actions that deliver more value than the cost of the meeting itself. The danger to productivity is not meetings — it’s ineffective meetings.
Instead of hiding from meetings, we should strive to make them effective. This article outlines ten golden rules I’ve learnt for making meetings valuable and productive.
Schedule Less Time Than You Think
Most calendars schedule meetings in thirty-minute increments. And yet, no meeting needs to be thirty-minutes long. Meetings should either be shorter or considerably longer.
Short meetings should be twenty minutes or less. That’s more than enough time to discuss an issue, take a decision, and get back to work. This is especially true if you don’t spend five minutes discussing the weather before you begin.
You may be thinking: “All my meetings are half-an-hour long and we use every minute!” But that’s just Parkinson’s Law in action. A twenty-minute meeting will easily expand to fill thirty minutes if you allow it to.
