On How to Make Your Meetings More Efficient

1 Idea💡

I got my first taste of corporate meeting culture in my first role out of graduate school.

Every meeting was 1-hour.

One-on-One with my manager? 1 hour.

Project status update? 1 hour.

Team brainstorming session? 1-hour.

And most of those 1-hour meetings felt jam-packed.

Then I got promoted to a new group and, during my first week, my calendar was filled with 30-minute meetings.

Coming from my previous 1-hour meeting culture, the idea of accomplishing anything meaningful in just 30-minutes seemed preposterous!

Imagine my surprise when those 30-minute meetings were just as productive as the 1-hour meetings I was so accustomed to.

The same level of productivity in half the time? What sorcery was this??

It wasn’t magic. It was Parkinson’s Law - the principle that work expands to fill the time alotted for its completion.

The term was coined by a British economist named Cyril Parkinson in a humorous 1955 essay about a woman whose only task for the day was to send a postcard - a task that should take the average person only a few minutes.

Because it’s her only task of the day, she spends 30-minutes picking out the card, another 60-minutes looking for her glasses, another 20-minutes deciding whether to take an umbrella on her walk to the mailbox…and on and on until she FINALLY sends her postcard, and accomplishes nothing else all day.

The story is meant to serve as a cautionary tale, highlighting the perils of giving ourselves too much time to get things done; the surplus of time has a tendency to get hijacked by procrastination and lack of focus.

Tying this back to the meeting culture on your team and in your organization, The concept of Parkinson’s Law encourages us to think critically about how much time we’re allocating for meetings.

In most cases, deliberately scheduling shorter meetings will create a collective sense of urgency and promote a laser focus on the most important topics on the agenda.

Did this week’s topic resonate with you? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know!

Want some help improving your organization’s meeting culture? Let’s schedule a 1-hour meeting to talk about it!

Actually, let’s make it a 15-minute meeting instead 😉 

See you next Wednesday,

Darin

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