Imagine that you have a meeting scheduled for 60-minutes, but you only
have 45 minutes worth of content. How long does that meeting last? Of
course, it lasts the full 60 minutes. What if you only have 35 minutes
worth of content? The meeting still lasts 60 minutes. 25 minutes of
content? Don’t worry, you’ll still be there for 60 minutes.

[What if you actually had 60 minutes worth of content? In that case,
your meeting would probably take 90 minutes!]

For you scientist types, you learned in Physics class (thanks to Boyle
and Bernoulli) that a gas will expand to fill the available space (for
example, there’s not a little pocket of oxygen in the middle of your
office right now; it’s expanded to fill your entire office). Well, in
more ways than one, meetings are like gas; they will expand to fill
whatever space you give them.

Why do most meetings last 60 minutes, regardless of how much content
there is? It’s because we usually don’t have any other way of knowing
when the meeting is over. Our schedule said we have a 1 hour meeting, so
it’ll be done when that hour is expired.

We recently conducted a study (which we’ll be releasing to the media in
a few weeks) that analyzed meetings. In one part, we asked people coming
out of meetings whether the meeting they just attended had accomplished its
original objective. Sadly, the most common response wasn’t “yes” and
it wasn’t “no.” The most common response was “I have no idea.”

The overwhelming majority of meeting attendees can’t tell you the real
objective of a particular meeting. Sure, they sit through lots of
meetings, some of which even have agendas, but they still can’t
articulate the actual objective of the meeting.

This causes 2 big problems. First, if you don’t know the real
objective of the meeting, it’s pretty hard to assess whether the meeting
was a success or failure. Second, if you can’t describe the objective,
you don’t know when you’ve achieved that objective. And that means
that you don’t know when you can tell all the participants “Hey gang,
we just accomplished our objective, so let’s get the heck out of here.”

I’ve always been amazed that so many meetings take exactly 60 minutes.
Regardless of the company, industry, size, geography, type of meeting,
etc., they all seem to take 60 minutes. It turns out that every meeting
takes 60 minutes because we don’t have a way of measuring when we’ve
accomplished our objective. Instead of clear objectives, all we’ve got
is a calendar entry that says this is a 60-minute meeting.

How do you fix this (and
[http://www.leadershipiq.com/index.php/upcoming-events/wasted-time] cut the
wasted time out of your meetings)? Very simply, you write a Statement of
Achievement for every single meeting (including conference calls, etc.). A
Statement of Achievement is 1 sentence that says “As a result of this
meeting, we will have achieved [insert something here].”

It’s not complicated, it’s just a statement that tells you what this
meeting needs to achieve before we can adjourn and go back to whatever we
should be doing. And if you can’t identify a hyper-specific achievement
that defines the meeting, you should cancel that meeting.

It doesn’t matter what your Statement of Achievement says, as long as
everyone in the meeting will know exactly when you’ve achieved it. Time
is not a good metric for assessing the success of a meeting. But agreeing
on a price for the proposal, picking a color for the new product, settling
on a new location, or completing 10 employee reviews, are all viable
Statements of Achievement. And they’ll tell you exactly when you’ve
achieved success (so you can leave the meeting and go accomplish some other
work).

Here’s a startling revelation. Every one of our clients that
implements this simple technique saves, on average, 15 minutes from every
meeting. (How much time could YOU save every single day if you could
shorten every 1-hour meeting by 15 minutes?) It turns out that most 60
minute meetings do NOT have 60 minutes worth of content. And even when
they do, if you tell people that the meeting ends as soon as they achieve
their objective, they cut out all the nonsense and chit-chat and focus like
a laser on achieving that objective.

Too many meetings are seen as a waste of time. But if you can eliminate
the wasted time from your meetings, using the Statement of Achievement,
everyone will be more productive and much happier.

One final note: Next week, I’m conducting a teleconference called
[http://www.leadershipiq.com/index.php/upcoming-events/wasted-time] “Cut
the Wasted Time Out of Your Day.” I’ll be giving you dozens of
hyper-practical tricks and tactics for eliminating wasted time and making
you more productive (and less stressed). This meeting technique is just
one the many cool techniques I’ll be covering. There’s limited
seating, and it’s almost full, so you should really register quickly.

Don't Miss This Live Teleconference!

[http://www.leadershipiq.com/index.php/upcoming-events/wasted-time] Cut
the Wasted Time Out of Your Day
Only 9 spots left for this event on August 27th.

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