This is the seventh and final post in the continuing series 31 Tips to Spend Time Properly. These time management tips will help you invest your minutes and hours more wisely, productively and energetically each day. Some of the tips can be done immediately; others require cultivation. All of these tips are time well spent.
31 Ways to Spend Time Properly
Tips 30-33: Meeting Management
30. Schedule meetings on Tuesday afternoons at 3PM. I can already hear someone calling out from the back row to object: “Sue, are you kidding me? Tuesday afternoons?” You don’t need to take my word about this. Read Courtney Rubin’s article “When Is The Best Time for a Meeting?” at Inc.com. Of course, that’s not the only time you can hold a meeting. But if you don’t know your audience and don’t have a strategy, you will waste time waiting for people to show up, to wake up, or worse, you might find yourself stood up!
31. Always use an agenda system when you hold a meeting. Not your meeting? Then always ask in advance what the agenda is for the meeting. If you call or attend a meeting without an agenda, the odds of wasted and unproductive time are 10 to 1. I like this quote from Helloladies.com: “Chairing a meeting without an agenda is like piling your coworkers and or clients into a bus and taking a trip without a map.”
Bonus Tip #1. Time Keepers. Assign someone to be a time-keeper in a meeting, and give them the power to keep the scheduled agenda items moving. Don’t let the urgent rob time from the important.
Bonus Tip #2. Less is often best. Have short meetings in a room with no chairs and stay standing. Scott Berkun includes this tip in HOW TO KEEP MEETINGS SHORT: 5 TRICKS. His more comprehensive 22 MINUTE MEETING has other great ideas.
Super Bonus Tip #3. How To Run Your Meetings Like Apple and Google. This may be the single best quick read on meeting management on the net. You can read the article at 99u.com. I love 99u’s definition of a meeting: “Sometimes necessary and often overused gatherings of workers for the exchange of ideas and information.” And here’s a link to their collection of meeting management articles. Kudos all around!