This resource first appeared in issue #108 on 05 Feb 2022
and has tags Becoming A Manager: Meetings
14 strategies to shorten lengthy meetings - Hanna Ross, Fellow.app
It’s been a little while since we’ve had a good meeting article in the roundup. This one covers some ground we’ve seen before, but meeting management is so fundamental that it’s always worth reviewing.
Ross’s points, slightly trimmed for length:
- Have a clear purpose and agenda for the meeting in advance, and send background materials - can’t emphasize this enough. Agendas and materials are important, but without an underlying purpose, you have no way to assess whether the meeting was good or not. The agenda is in service of the purpose, and the materials in service of the agenda.
- Limit number of attendees - including yourself, say no unless there’s a compelling reason for you to be there
- Assign meeting roles - facilitator, meeting taker, chair
- Assign lengths of time to agenda slots, with a parking lot for topics that come up.
- Say no to going off topic.
- In recurring meetings, shuffle the order of topics. (I haven’t seen this before - that’s a good idea!)
- Start at an usual time - we’ve been regularly having meetings start at 5 minutes past the hour and half-hour, which is great, but it’s especially handy if you..
- Use an unusual duration - are you sure that 55 minute meeting can’t be done in 45 minutes? Or 40?
- Have meeting ground rules for behaviour
- Do Q&A’s asynchronously.
