Keep meetings short

We have all suffered through meetings. You know that meeting that seems to just go on and on and on without an end in sight. If you hate them as much as me, then this article might just be for you. In the following lines I will share some tips and tricks that helped me organize and partake in pleasant, useful meetings.

Meetings are a necessity

As the size of the team grows and there are multiple parties involved in bringing a project to an end, the overhead associated with coordinating these multiple armies of people become significant. Meetings are just one of the tools that helps to keep people focused and on the right track. Meetings are also a distraction. They take people away from their daily work, it breaks rhythm and whoever took part in the meeting needs a bit of time to get back in the zone, and be a productive little bee again. Given the high cost that meetings have, it’s worth doing them right, so you can get the most value out of them.

Establish an agenda and stay on it!

Meetings should have a purpose! They should have a clear and precise purpose. If you are just sharing information, as in there is nothing to decide, you just want to let your team know something, that’s not a meeting, that’s a presentation, and it’s a whole different story on what makes presentations useful. Meetings should be about deciding things. They are the much nicer alternative to the huge email chain.

Getting back to the point. Before you start a meeting, you should know what needs to be decided. This way, if the discussion goes of track you can quickly spot it and steer it back on point and shave some minutes off there.

Let participants know what the agenda is.

The meeting will go a lot smoother if participants know what they are getting themselves into. They can do a bit of research beforehand, in the safety of their own desks. The more prepared participants are, the less time they need to learn what they need to know to reach a decision, the faster the meeting ends. Simple, right ? If you are a participant to the meeting, feel free to ask what the meeting is about and get all the relevant information you need to prepare.

Get the right people in the room

This one is more for the person organizing the meeting. Everyone in the room should be there with a purpose: they either have the knowledge to answer a question, or the power to decide on a course of action. Everyone else can be briefed via email after the meeting ends. Getting only the relevant people in the room saves a lot of the debate that arise from either explaining a decision to someone without sufficient knowledge on a particular subject, or dealing with opinions from people that ultimately have no saying in the project. Remember less (people) is more (useful meetings)!

Take things outside (of the meeting room)

I’m definitely not suggesting fighting when you don’t agree in meeting. Keep things civil, we are professionals after all! This bit is more about the kind of discussions that are still in the scope of the meeting, but are at a high level of detail, so that only a couple of people care about it. If most people are not getting anything from what is being discussed, then you don’t have the right people in the room and you are wasting their time. When people get into such an argument the right thing to do is to call time out and suggest they (and only they) continue this chat in private and let you all know how it went.

That’s it! Try to do that, so you get to enjoy the meeting you take part of, and, on top of that, feel like you’re actually doing something useful with your time while you are at it. Cheers!