Running Effective and Efficient Meetings

I spend a lot of time at work in meetings. I regularly think about having effective and efficient meetings and here’s a list of things that I think are important when it comes to doing meetings well.

• Keep meetings as short as possible: I think the vast majority of meetings can be had in 30 minutes. Some in 15 minutes. Anything over 30 minutes should be an exception. In my experience Parkinson’s Law very much applies to meetings. Starting meetings on time & getting right down to business help with keeping meetings short. If you’re in a recurring meeting and there’s regularly time left over during meetings, make the future meeting occurrences shorter.
• Keep # of attendees as small as possible: “Who absolutely needs to be at the meeting?” is a good question to ask before sending out the meeting invite. As a rule of thumb more people = slower & more inefficient meetings.
• Do not start meetings from a blank slate: Make sure there’s an agenda for the meeting. If the purpose of the meeting is to discuss a particular topic - it’s always best for there to be some document that the meeting attendees review prior to attending the meeting. As the meeting owner - hold people accountable to actually reviewing the document before the meeting takes place.
• Take notes. Share them out: Meetings are mostly a waste of time if nothing got written down and meeting notes didn’t get shared out. The vast majority of people do not have anything close to resembling a photographic memory, which is why writing things down is so important. It’s terribly inefficient and frustrating to have to re-visit & question something that was already discussed and settled on simply because things didn’t get written down. As I wrote about in this blog post I would encourage people to not only share their notes but to post their notes on a company-public wiki.
• Hold people accountable to action items from meetings: Doing this is made much easier if the bullet point right above this gets done.
• Avoid scheduling last minute meetings: I consider meetings that get scheduled during the same week as being “last minute”. Sometimes this is unavoidable but I like to avoid scheduling last minute meetings as much as possible. When people start work on Monday they should have a good idea of what their schedule for the rest of the week looks like.

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