Top 10 Strategies to Deal with Meetings

As a follow up post to yesterday's thoughts on productivity, I would like to reinforce some of the points with the focus on meetings. I have previously written about some of this stuff, but I thought a brief synthesis may be of help.

1. Do not waste your time on sending around emails to schedule a meeting. There are plenty of great tools that you can use. Personally, I like calendly.com (I have no commercial interest). That site connects directly to your calendar and let's people book appointments. You can specify what type of meetings you want to offer (my default is 20 minutes), when they can be scheduled (based on your calendar), and you can even charge for the meeting if you would like.
2. Cut the small talk to less than 2 minutes - seriously. Have a focused meeting and go and have a drink with the person in the evening if you want to chat about unrelated, personal stuff. You do not want to feel like you are working long hours but actually you spend a lot of time on non-work stuff. Being nice to each other and developing a shared identity by knowing colleagues is important, of course. So finding a balance is the key to this.
3. Make sure every meeting has a clear set of goals. If goals have not been defined by the time you meet, make sure they get agreed on first.
4. Do not agree to meetings that you already know you do not want to attend. Rather politely excuse yourself when the meeting gets planned.
5. Schedule meetings back-to-back. Having the next person walk through the door helps to keep meetings on time.
6. Keep detailed notes of the meeting. So much wasted time when people cannot remember what got discussed and decided during the last meeting.
7. Never agree to a meeting which is longer than 60 minutes, be prepared to politely wrap up and head out after 60 minutes.
8. Make sure everyone knows what their action items are and by when they need to be completed.
9. Do not provide food or drinks for meetings. This will only make the meeting longer, introduce a level of relaxation that slows everything down, and also many of us are trying to loose weight.
10. Wrap up the meeting by standing up and walking to the door (this will do it - almost always).

I hope of these strategies will make your day a bit less painful when it comes to meetings.

Take care,

Flavio