Meet all day, work all night?
Welcome back to the working smarter, not harder series. In our first three segments we talked about needing to benchmark current ways of working, making daily decisions based on your Vision/Mission statement, and having a priority list with only five priorities on it.
The fourth step is to re-purpose meetings!
We’ve all had days at the office where we were in meetings all day and wondered how we were going to get our work done. You attend the meeting because it’s important to your job. You get there and not all the key stakeholders are present…Why? They were triple booked with other meetings. The meeting proceeds and all you do is provide updates to the meeting organizer. The meeting is adjourned and you go to the next meeting and it’s a repeat of the last one. Sound familiar? Nothing gets done during the day anymore.
Our true work happens at night when we’re able to focus on tasks without interruption. One of the biggest problems with meetings today is that they’re focused on providing updates which could easily be done in other formats, like emails, phone calls or one on ones.
What do you do? Repurpose your meetings. Ban the update meeting and turn meetings into resolution sessions. By focusing on only getting people together to resolve issues is a sure way you can start working smarter. Another experiment to try – short all meetings by 15 minutes. Once this has been mastered, have a goal of making one day every week a meeting-free day.
Once your meetings are under control, incorporate the policy that no meeting should last more than 30 minutes. It’s amazing how efficient, effective and prepared you’ll be when you know you must resolve your issues in a short timeframe. By repurposing your meetings and trying these experiments you will find that everyone is able to get more work done at the office, resulting in working smarter, not harder.
Watch all of Adriana’s BizTV Canada videos
- Map your way to working smarter
- Back to the future
- Manage Priorities
- Meet all day, work all night
- What is value?
For more tips on running productive meetings, check out my pocket book, Good Meetings = Great Results!
Does your company have strict rules for meetings or no rules at all? Feel free to leave a comment below or shout out to us on Facebook or Twitter. Of course, you could always write your own blog post on the subject and share it with us… We’d love to read it!
