Optimize Meeting Duration

Have you ever wondered why all of your meetings seem to require exactly one hour to take place? Is it the case that every meal you eat, every brainstorm you have, and every personal encounter happens to require the exact same 60-minute cycle to achieve your needs? When is the last time someone asked you, “Hey Beven Spangenberg, what is the shortest possible time we can meet to figure out whether we should be running paid ads on Google?” Probably never. We live in a world where we take certain things about our time for granted, such as how long our interactions with other folks should take. This leads to us spending lots of wasted time on simply “showing up” at the expense of getting things done.

The New Meeting Default – 15 Minutes (Or 30..)

Now imagine if every time someone asked you to schedule a meeting your default suggestion was “OK I’ll book 15 minutes – unless you need more time?”

For some of us this may actually come across as rude, but before you dismiss the suggestion think about what it’s really asking (you can always modify the 15 minutes to be 30 minutes or some other increment you feel good about). You’re asking how long it will take to actually get something done. A short meeting window forces action, not chatter. Knowing you are “on the clock” forces everyone in the room to act quickly and decisively, which in most cases is exactly what a meeting is supposed to do. Yes, this means Ted in Biz Dev will not be able to spend the first 20 minutes updating you on his golf game. Perhaps that’s a separate, highly focused meeting. You’re giving yourself a quick “out” in case the meeting doesn’t make sense. Ever sit in an interview or first date and know within 5 minutes it’s not going to work? Why torture that interaction for 55 more minutes? If you schedule 15 minutes and go for 45 minutes you come across as highly accommodating. If you schedule 60 minutes and try to kill the meeting in 5 minutes you look like a jerk. You’re asking someone to add the context of “importance.” What’s important to your meeting attendees might not be on the same level of importance as what is currently on your plate. You might be dealing with a house that's burning down, and your meeting attendees might just want to discuss getting a glass of water. One of the wonderful things about having an assistant work as a proxy to you is that they can ask this question as a dutiful third party, avoiding some of the weirdness that comes with trying to keep a tight schedule yourself. If your VA asks an interview candidate “Would a call for 15 minutes on Friday with Hansel be helpful?” it doesn’t sound off-putting. It politely asks if that is the amount of time you’ll need to get things done. It also implies that you’ve got a tight schedule and you’re deliberate about managing your time, which most people don’t communicate very well.

Create Flex Time Windows

Building upon the notion that you can always add more time to a meeting but you can’t reduce it (without sending a bad signal) you can always build “flex times” into your calendar. Flex times simply suggest that the meeting is set for 15 minutes (or whatever duration you want) but you’ve allocated more time (30 minutes?) on your calendar so you’re not actually booked with a hard meeting time right behind your 15 minutes. The beauty of your flex time is that you’ll always find a use for it. Instead of scheduling two interviews at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. respectively, schedule them at 9 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. and then another at 9:30 to 9;45. Use the time in between to catch up on important work if it goes unused (hint, it will) or to extend other meetings a bit if you need to.

Key Takeaway: To build a healthy relationship with your calendar, set boundaries and parameters before your next meeting gets scheduled.

Control the Venue

Once you’ve managed to get your arms around the optimal duration for meetings, you can take your scheduling to another level by optimizing the venues. The typical cadence of a meeting goes something like this:

Darth Vader: “Grand Moff Tarkin, I’d like to get together to talk about the Rebel force that has appeared outside the Death Star’s perimeter.”

Grand Moff Tarkin: “Sounds cool Lord Vader, how about we meet at the Starbucks in Sector Alpha at 7 p.m.?”

Darth Vader: “Oh I love me some Venti Skim Milk, Extra Shot, Extra-Hot, Extra-Whip, Sugar-Free Caramel Macchiato, I’ll see you there then.” Darth Vader, for as powerful of a Sith Lord as he is, just conceded control of three critical elements of the calendar game – location, medium, and time. In this case, it’s fairly irrelevant given the soon to be the ultimate destruction of the Death Star, but even still – he should have never let this whole meeting conundrum take place.

Control the 3 Calendar Variables

If you want to take back your calendar you’ve got to learn to take control of the 3 Calendar Variables.

1. Location. Unless you’re really into the serendipitous discovery of coffee shops and conference rooms, letting someone else determine the meeting location is never helpful. You want venues that are easy to get to, close to your next appointment, and if food is a factor, places you actually enjoy.
2. Medium. More important than location is the medium – phone, face to face, instant message, video chat, HAM radio – whatever. You want to optimize every meeting so that it’s leveraging the best tool for the job. In our case, you want your VA to do that for you. Could Darth have saved the Death Star if he covered his meeting via low-resolution holographic video phone Skype? Probably. But we’ll never know..
3. Time. Here we have good ol’ Tarkin telling Vader what time they should meet. Does Vader have availability at that time? Perhaps he’s doing Jedi Hot Yoga. Vader should know that setting a meeting time should always coincide with optimizing for your best time, not other people’s.

Optimize for Medium

There are so many great ways to communicate these days, but we still tend to use them fairly arbitrarily. We call when we’re in the car. We meet face-to-face when it seems politically appropriate. We email whenever humanly possible. Instead of using these tools arbitrarily, you should control your calendar by using them very deliberately. In the case of your assistant working for you, you can ask them to specifically use the tools that save you the most time or create the most amount of efficiency.

You can rank these differently, but generally:

• Quick, Non-Critical. (Email, Instant Messenger, Text). This is your first line of defence. Anything that can be moved to Email, IM or Text does a few great things for you – it keeps the message back/forth brief, and it makes it asynchronous so you can respond whenever possible.
• Lots of Back/Forth, Timely. (Phone, Video Chat). Most text-based comms are good for simple communication, but if you really need to have a discussion, such as an interview or a sales process, you really can’t beat a good old-fashioned phone call, or ideally, video chat. The challenge, of course, is that it can eat up lots of time where a simple email could have sufficed. Choose wisely here.
• Personal Dynamic, Relationships. (In Person). Nothing beats a face to face meeting for maximum impact. Remember all of those amazing moments you shared with your parents over video chat? No? Of course not. Real moments are made in person. They also happen to be the most logistically complicated and costly of meetings, so unless the interaction requires the personal touch, this is the last resort.

List your Go-To Locations

One way to help control your meeting times and the cadence of the meetings is to give yourself a home field advantage – stick to a few tried and true locations and always suggest them first. If you’re using an assistant then making a quick list of your favourite coffee shops, restaurants or conference rooms is a must. Aside from finding yourself in places you enjoy more often, it will also allow you control the time between meetings, letting you make sure your lunch just happens to be two doors down from your next meeting. This sounds obvious but how many meetings have you attended in the last few weeks where you were the one setting the venue? Not many? You see what we mean?

Key Takeaway: Get the most out of meetings by using the proper medium for that specific type of interaction. When meeting in person—don’t travel across town—instead, meet at your favourite coffee shop.

Start with the Outcome

How often do you start a meeting with a clear indication from everyone in the room with what you’re supposed to achieve after you leave? If you’re like most, not often. Most calendar appointments look like this: Subject: “G8 Summit: Meet to talk about Impending Asteroid Collision with Earth” Awesome. You’ve let everyone know that 1. You are going to meet and 2. That there is an open-ended discussion happening about the cataclysmic destruction of the planet. However, on the brink of Armageddon, it’d be nice to know that the folks responsible for this discussion focused more on the outcome of the meeting than the subject of it. Here’s a slightly better way to frame this meetup: Subject “G8 Summit: Finalize details and enact Counter-Asteroid Launch Plan”

Set Goals First

A nice question to ask before starting any meeting is “What do we want to achieve before we leave?” Think of a million possible scenarios that you’ve been a part of – all those endlessly crappy meetings – that could have been avoided if someone had just asked this one simple question.

By setting goals early you achieve a few critical things:

• Force people to get to the point before the meeting. Love sitting in cyclical management meetings where people just provide updates for the sake of providing updates? You do? Wow, you’re a terrible person.
• Potentially avoid meetings. The Grand Poobah of reasons to ask the goals ahead of time. All Jacobim Mugatu wanted to know was whether we should showcase the Piano Neck Tie in next year’s fashion show? Wow, we just saved an hour of our lives by realizing that early and just answering in an email.
• Drive preparation. Knowing the specific goals and outcomes allows everyone to be better prepared for the meeting, leading to shorter meeting times and better resolutions. Not telling anyone what the goal is ahead of time leads to the opposite of that.

Confirm the Goals

Elapsing time is a powerful force, and among its many powers one of them is taking once-important meetings and making them now-not-important.

By being explicit about goals, it makes it easier to determine over time whether that pending meeting is still relevant to all parties.

Let’s go back to our earlier example:

Subject: “G8 Summit: Meet to talk about Impending Asteroid Collision with Earth” Hm. Was that meeting about what to do about it? About the fact that it was avoided? About the fact that we are all now particle space dust floating in the cosmic abyss? I’m not sure, because it’s impossible to determine whether a meeting should still happen if no one defined its purpose ahead of time.

Set Goals First, Calendar Second

The key here is to just simply get in the habit of taking a minute to align on goals before just setting up meetings all willy nilly. This is a great task to put on the plate of your potential assistant to make sure every meeting you attend has a deliberate purpose, or more importantly, that those that can’t seem to find a purpose magically make their way to meeting Neverland.

Key Takeaway:

By outlining clear expectations and goals before scheduling a meeting, you’ll get more out of each meeting you have. During meetings.