If you find your days full of back-to-back meetings, here are some tactics that I found helped.
1 . Screencast
If you find that you are giving the same talk to group after group, screencast your talk and send it in advance.
The 20 minutes it will take you to record will send you many hours. You record yourself delivering the talk – often a PowerPoint – and you can have your face in the corner or just your voice.
Your audience can watch the video in advance and send the questions they have in advance.
The only reason people would not want the video in advance is they don’t really want the talk.
Loom, PowerPoint and Screencast are all good options.
2. Require an Agenda
Would you give up an hour or more of your time without knowing why you are there? I don’t.
I ask for an agenda at least 48 hours in advance. It helps me prepare and bring something of value to the meeting.
If an action point needs me there, I’ll turn up. And, if I can answer it in advance, that item can be removed, and I am not needed.
If meetings are just to inform people, screen or audio cast the meeting and send it to people for information. They can listen to it at 2x speed, and get the information they need.
3. Pre-Reads
I think there are two ways to go here.
I prefer a pre-read 48 hours before the meeting. It allows me to digest the issue and if there are points that need clarification/need answers, it gives me the time to dig around and find the answer.
I also think good thinking takes time and sleeping on an idea and taking a long walk somehow leads to a good solution appearing.
I don’t find good solutions popping into my brain on a busy agenda. An alternative is the Amazon approach of a 6-page memo and a 30-minute silent read of the memo at the start of the meeting. I sort of fantasise about this.
This tactic is good. If there is no pre-read, the meeting just gets cancelled. You get to free up some time to think about things that need your focused
4. Regular meetings
We all have regular meetings with colleagues and clients.
For clients, I’ll send an update the day before listing new developments, questions for the meetings, and a list of actions to track (e.g. upcoming meetings/votes).
This allows people to focus on key next actions and points that need clarification.
For team meetings, team members can send updates in advance and flag if they need input. Team meetings are not meant to be a cathartic exercise of semi-public angst grinding. If they go there, move it on. An individual’s frustrations with the world/political direction are not be sorted by the wailing and gnashing of teeth in a meeting.
People can read faster than they can speak. So the time spent writing any update or request for input is going to pay itself back several times over,
5. Have your assistant filter
If you are fortunate, you’ll have an assistant who’ll make sure that you don’t have
They can review the pre-reads and see if they are up to quality.
If not, they can cancel the meeting for you.
Your assistant can turn down meetings with no agenda/preread or appear pointless.
This support will add many hours to your week and keep pointless distractions off your agenda.
Want to Free Up 2 More Hours A Day
Doing these five things will easily save you 2 hours of the day.
With that time released, you can try something radical, like finishing the memo, meeting a decision maker outside, or making a pitch to a potential new client.
If you like these five, here are some other techniques.
- Stop multitasking. It does not work.
- Turn off distractions on your phone and PC. Distractions switch your brain away from the task at hand. And, you are not smart enough to focus on high-value input with distractions. No-one is.
- Block out time to complete certain tasks and focus on it for that time.
- Double the time estimate you think it is going to take. We are all unrealistic about how long something is going to take.
- Leverage your expertise and produce checklists, Standard Operating Procedures, templates and case studies. It allows you to complete similar pieces of work quicker.
- If you manage people, train them quickly to do your job. Get them to use the checklists, SOPs etc.
- You need to leverage your team. This means you need to provide a clear request and if it is new to a colleague, send them examples, checklists, SOPs, and training videos. If you give a colleague garbage instructions you can’t complain when you don’t get what you wanted.
- Produce screencast training of your approach for colleagues. It will accelerate training and improve retention. Learning does not happen by mere physical proximity to you, osmosis of your notes, but by doing.
- Use software like One Note etc to provide a second brain of everything written so anyone on your team can find it.
- Use software like Click up, Monday.com, MS Teams to track progress on a piece of work. This act alone will reduce your emails torrent by 50%.
- Use the voice transcript function in MS Teams or Otter.ai to record meetings and produce a fast summary and next actions.
- Use a Tickler file to keep track of meetings and follow-ups.
- Say No. You have 40 hours in the week at work. You can’t keep adding on tasks. There is no shame in saying “Sorry, no, I can’t help you turn this around by tomorrow at 9 am. It’s 6 pm. I can get it to you in 5 days. I have other pressing commitments.”. If they push back ask them how long they knew this was needed, and you will likely hear about a week ago.
If you do the above, you will find another 2 hours a day are set free.