Shrink your 2hrs Meetings into a “30min Productive Session”

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

If you are a business person or working at a job that requires meetings daily, you have probably been through the 2 to 3 hours meetings. Most meetings are probably just a chat room — some people call it brainstorming. However, brainstorming is different than what happens most of the time. You can brainstorm for 10–20 minutes and analyze the findings. What happens in meetings? People are chatting, share their stories, and share a joke here and there while time is ticking... Ops! 3 hours passed.

The main issue with long meetings is that most of them have no rules or timeline to follow. Corporate meetings are the worst. They tend to arrange meetings just to talk about the issues and the progress in certain projects without setting any guidelines and agendas to follow.

Having to attend long meetings without any real outcomes is a waste of time. I have attended a lot of meetings — in my workplace, most of them wasted my time. Setting meetings without proper planning is like going to an exam without studying.

Certain actions need to be taken to get the most out of the meetings we attend. Unfortunately, we can only control the meetings we host. If we are invited for a meeting, we should set a time limit to sneak out or get out of there with a lame excuse — I’m not responsible for your actions.

Here are some recommended remarks to make the best out of meetings and save your time and others:

#1 Answer the Questions First.

Before deciding to host a meeting and invite random employees/teams, ask yourself the following questions in the same order as follows:

1. Can this meeting be an email or a conference call? If yes, you don’t need a meeting.
2. Can this meeting be delegated to someone else to get the answers to whatever your concerns are? If yes, you don’t need a meeting.
3. Can this meeting be a one-on-one meeting — with the team head, for instance — instead of the whole crew? If yes, schedule a meeting with that person alone and ask him to get answers to your questions.
4. Can this meeting wait one week? If yes, the meeting is not urgent, skip it and get the answers by email or call.
5. Do you have a clear agenda for the meeting and the answers to the questions you have in mind? If not, go do your homework and figure out the questions. After that, start to answer the question again.
6. Does the meeting involve decision-making? If yes, ask your team to do their homework a few days before the meeting — Don’t ever do pop-meetings (as in pop-quizzes); this is not college.

#2 Plan for the Meeting

The worst thing you can do is call the team and tell them to get ready for a meeting in 10 minutes. This will not turn out to be good most of the time. Instead, plan for it. And here is some remarks for doing so:

1. Get all your questions, put them into a bullet point list, limit the meeting point to as few as possible, and make them easy to understand and answer — we’re not trying to solve a riddle here.
2. Eliminate the points that seem off-topic or need a separate meeting by themselves.
3. Try to be concise and make the questions as straightforward as possible.
4. Include the people who will answer your questions, be responsible for the questions, or benefit from the questions. Exclude others as you are wasting their time.
5. Ensure to email all the invitees an email with the meeting objectives, questions, and time. Also, include a simple guideline for the meeting and make rules like no interruptions during presentations, keeping your phones off, and having no side topics. And send it to them with a joyful attitude. Here is a sample email you could use:

Hi Everyone,

I’d like to inform you about our meeting this week. Mark your calendars on Tuesday, Jul 6, 2021, at 10:00 am in meeting room #2. Please find the meeting agenda and the guideline for the meeting attached to this email.

Note: the guideline is developed to ensure that we achieve more productive outcomes from our meetings and answer all questions and concerns that you might have in a more organized fashion.

If you have any questions, kindly reply to this email.

Thanks,

Ahmad

#3 Time the Meeting and Stick to It.

If you decided to go for setting a meeting, view the agenda that you set in step #2 and time the meeting accordingly — guesstimate the time needed for each point of the agenda and try to keep an eye on the time. Try to have someone to keep an eye on the clock and time the meeting. Have time for questions, time for brainstorming(if applicable), time for discussion — limit it, and even time for breaks(in case of meetings more than 1 hour).

Try to keep the meetings as short as possible and follow the guidelines you set up from step #2. Be the leader that you wished someone would be like when you were a junior.

Shorten your 2-hour meeting into 30 minutes by distributing tasks and getting the outcome through emails before the meeting. You only need to discuss the findings instead of going through the problem, concerns, and genius solutions everyone wants to answer — meetings are gates to promotions and recognition to some employees.

Final thoughts

This might be impossible to find such a framework for meetings if you work in a government institute — I’ve been working in two of my country's highest reputable government institutes. Still, the meetings are a mess.

Working in corporate companies might be somewhat better than the governmental institutes, but some people believe that they are even worst. As these companies are big and have a respectable reputation in their field. However, behind closed doors, they lack proper management and productivity.

So, if you are a manager/supervisor and are reading this, try your best to apply the steps mentioned above and become a role model to your employees; only then expect more productivity.

That’s all for this post; I hope you enjoyed it.
If you did, it would be great to share it with your friends and family. Also, if you want me to write about a particular topic/method in productivity, I would be more than happy, reach me @alounpro on social media — click my name at the bottom
Have a lovely day!
— Ahmad