Do you keep jumping from meeting to meeting, answering emails on your smartphone and with that sense of lost time? This is one of the great evils of modern corporate life – but it can be avoided. By request of the Harvard Business Review, consultant Elizabeth Grace Saunders teaches how:
1) Accept fewer invitations to meetings. If you were ill on the day of the meeting, would it have to be rescheduled? If the answer is “no,” you may not need to actually be present. Ask the meeting agenda for the organizer, have someone on your team in place and request the notes later. Most often this is more than enough.
2) Reduce the time and the number of meetings you schedule. Your ‘standard time’ for a meeting is an hour? You usually do follow-up meetings, status updates and alignments of work priorities? Do not make a meeting to talk about something that could be settled on a phone call and do not phone for something that be settled by email.
3) Block time for the real work. You need to read about your industry, give personal feedback to someone, do some complex analysis? Block it on your schedule, before your time is taken by meetings. Your decisions will have more quality and convey more security.
We at Runrun.it really love the idea of reducing time spent in meetings. The product itself was created precisely so that meetings for follow-up and re-prioritization of projects and tasks become unnecessary. An additional benefit is the reduction in the number of e-mails, which is another huge source of wasted time. Try it: http://runrun.it
If you want to check the original article, here is the link: hbr_time_management
