Challenge yourself and your co-workers to the 30 day 30 minute meeting challenge, it will be the best thing you do this month, year, ever. Be a productivity and time management hero by giving yourself and co-workers hours, possibly days, of their lives back. Most meetings are huge time wasters and leave participants frustrated and wondering “what just happened in there?”. Most meetings are poorly managed and unnecessary. The list of reasons why meetings suck could go on for days but this simple challenge can reduce the time you spend in meetings by up to 50% or more.
Why you should schedule 30 minute meetings.
- Respectful of people and their time
- Accomplishes meeting objectives in half the time
- Creates a sense of urgency
- Increases meeting engagement and participation
The 30 day 30 minute meeting challenge is simple, instead of scheduling 60 minute meetings, schedule 30 minute meetings. Below is a bulleted list of how you execute the challenge along with some tips and tricks:
- Step 1 – Ask yourself if you really need to have a meeting. If “Yes” go to Step 2 if “No” do not schedule meeting.
- Step 2 – Schedule a 30 minute meeting instead of a 60 minute meeting.
- Step 3 – Repeat step 1 for every meeting.
30 Day 30 Minute Meeting Challenge Tips and Tricks:
- Gather baseline data. Take a few minutes and do a basic count of the number of 60 minute meetings you have on your calendar for a 30 day period. Consider tracking the following metrics: number of 60 minute meetings, number of 60 minute meetings I scheduled, number of meetings greater than 60 minutes, number of meetings less than 60 minutes.
- Establish a starting date. The sooner you start the challenge the better, so I would recommend starting tomorrow.
- Meeting evaluations. Gather subjective data from the 30 minute meetings. Do a quick meeting evaluation at the end of each meeting or if you want to be more formal you can whip up a quick survey to send to meeting participants to gather feedback. Either way ask people what they think of the 30 minute meeting.
- Track the amount of time you have saved. This will blow your mind. Every time you schedule a 30 minute meeting add a tick mark to your data tracker and at the end of your 30 day challenge total the number of tick marks multiply by 30 and that is roughly the amount of time you saved by scheduling 30 minute meetings vs. 60 minute meetings.
Good luck!