The Case for 20min and 45min Meetings
The days of old would have been constantly running at a breakneck pace to finish up a meeting only to run or digitally join another only to say “Sorry my last [insert activity here] ran over”. The brain would be shifted from a very high gear to a completely different set of gears equally high.
The Case for 20min and 45min Meetings
We live in a remote world now. I am not sure that if we were not a majority remote workforce this article would be written, or if it would, I surely would not feature it. The content here would be added to a much larger idea like Time Management - respecting others. Hey, I think that maybe an upcoming article. Back to reality, this remote world has opened our eyes to things like how to be more effective, respecting boundaries, and Time Management.
The days of old would have been constantly running at a breakneck pace to finish up a meeting only to run or digitally join another only to say “Sorry my last [insert activity here] ran over”. The brain would be shifted from a very high gear to a completely different set of gears equally high. Executing thought and technical architecture at the highest of levels that command the rate in which I would be paid for just being present.
We all have been in these situations and let’s be honest here, we all know after we felt clear and absolved of our tardiness or just joining in time our eyes wondered to the notifications of follow up emails from the previous meeting with take-aways and thank-you’s, The real offense comes at the end of the meeting. Undoubtedly you may be distracted by queueing up that next call. You may even shout out the obligatory “I have a hard stop”. The voice on the other end will chime out with 2min left in the meeting that they acknowledge said hard stop, “out of respect for time”… Yet the meeting just rolls on past the end and you are late yet again. You feel overtaxed. Your bladder is hating your and your tea or coffee stares up at you near empty and cold.
I submit that if you were to run a tight ship on your calendar this wouldn’t happen. That would be like saying the sky is blue though, wouldn’t it? Unpacking these scenarios there will be a few common threads. The first one surrounds either a point of pride for some or the downfall for others and that is the multitasking myth.
There are no such processes or subroutines in the human mind that allows for productive multitasking. Yes, you can do more than one thing at a time but your attention, real mindful attention is a single thread constraint of the brain. Starting a task like deploying a DevOps script to run and at interval check on it while having a conversation about the merits of Peer to Site VPN networking in Azure can be done because your focus and attention start the DevOps task which is largely a self-sustaining autonomous set of tasks. A blip or two of your brain’s processing is dedicated to the quick glance at the screen looking for a red or green indicator next to the job. It is not a very complex action. By modern approach, I suppose you can call it multitasking, it is not really.
I don’t call jumping from one VM to the next and back again doing configuration or app deployment multitasking. Again your attention, eyes, and hands are only dedicated to one process at a time. I am sure that this is resonating in some capacity with you either being an offender or offended by this. You ask “Ok I get it but attention can’t be the only casualty of tight meetings” You are correct there are a couple more things that lay in the grave next to your ability to accomplish things effectively. Your reputation.
Not being 100% present will impact your job. You will either look scattered or risk missing a critical point of information that is a detail you may misspeak or have an action item/follow-on you’re going to miss. Your personal brand will be crafted in ways that you will not like and potentially cannot recover from. Snuggling up against your effectiveness and reputation will be opportunity.
If you are constantly taxed, not available, and exhibit a lack the ability to get things done properly you will be either passed over for career advancement or not given access to opportunities with new technologies and showcase your abilities. Seems trivial, though as someone who manages people, I want to enable people who focus on positive and repeatable results but understand their own limits. Those who know their limits manage to this, others will have to find this out or be coached. An unwanted side effect if these behaviors is termination.
So now that I have gone entirely too far from your meeting running long to losing your job, let’s get down to business on how to best avoid these scenarios. First off, you will have meetings run long and over regardless of what you do. It is unavoidable. Putting a few things in place can help you be more together like building time in your calendar to get yourself in order. If your scheduling how about scheduling a 20minute meeting over a 30minute meeting or a 45minute meeting over an hour meeting.
If you're at the mercy of others for scheduling or if you have some policy that requires defined blocks try to put focus time on your calendar in the late morning or midday and later in the afternoon. This will allow you to review your notes and do same-day follow-ups.
Ideally, I would like to shorten the meetings to 20 and 45 respectively (or some interval that provides a buffer of time before your next activity). By doing this, it will allow you to split the time between wrapping up offline activities from the ending call and teeing up what you need to do for the upcoming call.
A few simple techniques like these will have you not look put together, rather you will be together and mindfully present for the topic(s) at hand. There are some organizations that have already encouraged this behavior and others that leave it up to the employee to manage their time only to look at their results.
I want you to be your best so pick what fits your work style best and try it for three weeks. Not a couple of days, not a week, yes three weeks. Behaviors take time to be altered just as time and cycles are required to determine effectiveness. Again it will not be the case where everything will fit nicely in these approaches. Manage to the exception and not the rule.
-Michael Askins
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