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These 9 meeting hacks can help you get back hours each week
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Good and bad meetings
- Done right, meetings provide an excellent structure for getting work done, making decisions, and moving projects forward.
- Done incorrectly, meetings keep you from focusing on your most important priorities and are a complete waste of your time.
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Eliminate
- Don’t schedule meetings: The answer to every issue or to moving ahead every project isn’t scheduling a meeting.
- Don’t attend meetings: You don’t have to accept every meeting invite you receive. Go to and be fully present at meetings where you have something to contribute or learn.
- Don’t agree to meetings requests from people you don't know: If you think a meeting is necessary, schedule it yourself.
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Reduce
- Reduce frequency: Not all meetings need to be weekly. Reduce them to however often you need to stay on track.
- Reduce length: Your default could be 30 minutes or 45 minutes.
- Reduce drive-by meetings: Informal meetings can be valuable. But they can also be overwhelming when they take up the very limited amount of time you have between scheduled meetings.
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Streamline
- Have an agenda: Make sure that no meeting wanders aimlessly without clarity about why you’re meeting and what you’re hoping to accomplish.
- Have a facilitator: He can explain the agenda, keep the conversation flowing in the right direction and make sure that everyone has clarity on the next steps by the end of the meeting.
- Have an out: This could mean scheduling back-to-back meetings or scheduling something at a time where you or the other person attending has to leave for something specific like catching a train.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Getting Things Done: the basics
- Capture. Write down everything you need to do.
- Clarify. Break down each task into an actionable next step.
- Organize. Move each of those actionable ta...
The 2-minute rule
If the effort to keep remembering a task is more than just getting it out of the way now, then do it.
Fixing small tasks
- Fixing things is empowering. Our confidence increases or decreases based on our ability to make progress.
- Any progress builds momentum (and your mood): No matter how small the task is, crossing it off your to-do list gives you a boost of momentum and enhances your mood.
- Small steps turn into habits: When a task is easy to do and quickly completed, it’s much easier to turn it into a habit.
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Key Ideas
The first 5-7 minutes of a meeting
....is the most important component for conducting more effective meetings.
It establishes the parameters, organizes the terms of reference and tells everybody in the room w...
Begin right on time
During a meeting, do not penalize the people who were there on time by waiting for others who are late.
Assume that the latecomer is not coming at all and get right on with the meeting.
Encouraging open discussions
During meetings, it’s very important to get input from everybody, not only from those eager to contribute but even from those who are shyer and less likely to speak up.
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Key Ideas
Automate Decisions
- Transfer money to your savings account every time you receive a paycheck
- Choose all your outfits for your week on Sunday and hang them in the closet in order
- S...
Single Task
Switching between tasks can have damaging costs to our work and productivity.
Develop the habit of single-tasking by forcing your brain to concentrate on one task and one task only. Put your phone away, close all the browser windows and apps that you don’t need. Immerse yourself in this task. Only move to the next one when you’re done.
Brian Tracy
“Time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.”