When I worked in the corporate world, I often found meetings frustrating.
Technology Aloha, referencing Percolate, outlines six key rules for efficient meetings to combat unproductive sessions. These rules advocate for assessing meeting necessity, defaulting to a 15-minute duration, and excluding spectators to ensure focused discussions. Additionally, Technology Aloha emphasizes establishing a clear purpose upfront, assigning concrete tasks to specific individuals, and prohibiting computers or phones to maximize participant engagement and productivity.
You know, unless there was bacon. Meetings with bacon are never a waste.
Now that I own my own company, I still find that meetings often stretch beyond what is productive. If you find this to be the case in your work life, take a look at the following rules for efficient meeting from Percolate.
- Do you really need a meeting? If not, don’t schedule one and just go talk to the person. It’s generally easier, faster and more efficient.
- Meetings should be 15 minutes by default. If you need longer, take longer, but most meetings don’t need much longer than that. People will find ways to fill whatever amount of time the meeting was scheduled for, so don’t schedule more time than you need. If you get scheduled in a longer meeting, why don’t you ask why it needs to be so long?
- No spectators. If you don’t have any reason to be in the meeting, don’t go. We don’t need spectators at meetings. The corollary of this is that if there are spectators in your meeting, ask them why they’re there and to leave if they don’t have any reason to be there.
- Have a purpose, state it upfront. If your meeting doesn’t have a goal than you should probably revisit tip #1. You should have a goal (except for weekly check-in meetings) and everyone should understand that goal. If you are attending a meeting and you don’t know the goal, ask. If the person who set the meeting doesn’t have an answer, suggest the meeting be moved until there is one. This will help A LOT.
- Make tasks, assign them to people. Meetings start to suck when everyone walks away and it isn’t clear who is doing what. If you set a goal at the beginning there should be some tasks at the end. Make sure everyone knows who is assigned to those tasks (put them in Asana if applicable). A task isn’t a task if it doesn’t have a person assigned to it.
- Don’t bring computers or phones. This is important enough to mention again. If we want to have as few meetings as possible and make them as short as possible it’s important that everyone is focused on the task at hand. That means not doing other stuff during the meeting. If you catch someone doing something else, call them out and ask them not to. If their computer is open and they’re not presenting or creating tasks/taking notes, ask them to close it. If they need to be checking mail or working on something else, they probably shouldn’t be at the meeting.
Source: The 6 Meeting Rules of Percolate – The Percolate Blog
