Tip #3

With your calendar under your control and your workload organised into a manageable structure, the next step is to make your meetings both productive and quick…

Here’s a checklist of what needs to be in place to ensure each meeting you hold is effective (we’ll come onto meetings you attend after this):

1. Clear purpose for the meeting.
2. Specific outcomes identified.
3. Process to achieve those outcomes mapped out.
4. Estimate of how long it’s going to take to achieve the purpose of the meeting and appropriate time allocated.
5. The right people to achieve the outcomes invited with plenty of notice. Meeting room booked if it’s an in-person meeting.
6. Each person knows why you have invited them and what you would like them to contribute.
7. Written agenda circulated before the meeting, reiterating the purpose of the meeting, the desired outcomes and the process. Highlight information you want people to bring or question you’d like them to have pondered beforehand.
8. Reminder sent 24 hours before the meeting, confirming the location or video link.

Then, on the day of your meeting:

• Be the first in the meeting room or online so you can welcome each person as they arrive and thank them for giving their time.
• If you’re in-person, write the outcomes for the meeting on a whiteboard where everyone can see it.
• Start on time, follow the agenda and keep referring to the outcomes. Close down any discussion of irrelevant topics politely but firmly.
• Encourage everyone to contribute and ask for the opinions of those who are slowest to speak up.
• Stick to your process unless it’s obvious that something else will work better. If you decide to do something else, let everyone know that’s what you’re doing so that they’re not distracted by you deviating from the published plan.
• Finish on time, or earlier if you can. Thank everyone for their input, confirm the achievement of your outcomes and tell them what happens next.

Hands up if you’re thinking that sounds like a lot of work and will take up more time than you usually allocate to a meeting!

It might initially seem to be more time-consuming to prepare as thoroughly as I’ve suggested, especially if you’ve been doing ok by ‘winging it’ in a lot of meetings and everyone else is doing the same.

Meetings culture is very informal in a lot of organisations and that actually means you need more preparation, not less, for the meetings to be effective.  My prediction is that if you go through the checklist and put everything in place, you’ll have a productive meeting AND you’ll have grateful colleagues.  Very few people get any enjoyment out of long, unfocused meetings that don’t achieve much.

But what if it’s not your meeting?  What about all those meeting invitations that keep dropping into your inbox with only the barest detail of content?

I suggest you contact the person holding the meeting and ask:

• What is the purpose of the meeting and what specific output are they looking for?
• Why did they invite you? Does it have to be you or could one of your team attend on your behalf?
• Do you (or your team member) need to be present for the whole meeting or is your specialist input only relevant for part of it?
• What can you prepare in advance to make the meeting efficient on the day?

Be reasonable.  This is not an excuse for making other people feel bad if they’re not perfectly prepared.  Just be nice, ask some questions and find out how you can help make their meeting a success without taking over.

I know of people who refuse to attend a meeting if they’re not sent a full agenda with the meeting request.  Whilst that might be a good strategy for keeping your calendar uncluttered, it can seriously impact your professional relationships and reduce your influence with colleagues.  As I said, be kind to other people and if they’re not perfectly clear about everything on the checklist, ask a few questions to help them organise their thinking.  That way, everybody benefits.

As part of a strategy for getting out of overwhelm, this might seem quite time-consuming.  It is, but nowhere near as time-consuming and energy-sapping as a day of back-to-back meetings that don’t achieve very much or take forever to do it.

Thirty minutes of well-prepared, focused discussion can be amazingly productive, leaving you more time to put in place the actions you picked up in the meeting and more time to prepare for other meetings.

Tip #4 next week…