Have you ever left a meeting and thought, “That didn’t need to take that long?”
Days are short and yet somehow the meetings that fill up the day can feel long. Why is this? If your calendar is jammed with meeting after meeting, you might feel like you spend all day working without having time to actually do any work.
Here are three ideas that might help you find an extra hour or two in your day.
- Discover the mode of communication that works best for your team. Additionally, you may be working with a group remotely. Remote work is increasing, with 4.7 million people clocking into their jobs from outside a traditional office. This means we have to consider what’s best for the team—does a traditional conference call fall into chaos or would a video conference with chat capabilities like Zoom help? Could a team that needs to be in frequent communication try an app like Slack to send quick messages?
- When possible, keep meetings to 30 minutes. Efficient meetings run about 30 minutes. When you’ve finished discussing the topic at hand, it’s time to move on. Don’t dawdle in the room. It’s okay to leave early!
- Get creative with your calendar. Sometimes we have to face the music—we’re busy people! So, if you’re feeling like you really can’t get out or alter any of your meetings, what can you do to shake them up? Turn your meeting into a walk and talk session and ask your colleague to catch up with you while taking a walk. Find one day or afternoon a week that you can block off as a meeting free zone. Start each meeting with an ice breaker so that you get to really know the people you see so often.
Unfortunately, we can’t add more time to the clock—but we can be more efficient so that none of our time is wasted!
