The power of the 10 minute meeting

Meetings are a necessity at work, but the figures show that we’re not always using them correctly and end up killing productivity in our offices:

• 25-50% of the time people spend in meetings is wasted (Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics)

• 45% of senior executives claims their employees would be more productive if their firms banned meetings for a least one-day a week (Office Team)

• $37 billion is wasted on unnecessary meetings every year in the US (Software company, Atlassian)
One way to cut down on this unnecessary waste and boost productivity is to cut down your meeting time – right down.

Here are 5 reasons why 10 minutes is plenty for a meeting.

1. Focus
Studies show that over 70% of people bring other work to meetings. If you cut the meetings down in length, people won’t have time to do anything but focus on what the meeting is about.

They’ll also prioritise what is important to them, which not only means the meeting will run faster but also helps attendees to analyse, prioritise and tackle their own workload.

2. Free time
The Atlassian survey found people had 61 meetings every month, with half of them considered wasted time. This came to 31 hours of unproductive meetings time a month. By cutting your meetings down to 10 minutes a day, you’ll only be spending 50 minutes a week or 200 minutes a month in meetings, freeing up the rest of the time for more productive work.

Even if you held two 10 minutes meetings a day – one at the start and another at the end – you’d still be saving time.

3. More regular
If you keep your meetings to 10 minutes, you can hold them more regularly. Once you get into the habit of getting everything said and done in the least time possible, you could even hold them 3 times a day.

This will help you keep abreast of what is happening in the office and tackle problems daily instead of after a week when they’ve gotten out of hand.

4. Review
Regular meetings mean that staff will have to constantly review their workload and see where things are at. They can no longer put things on the back burner and then quickly deal with them before the monthly meeting.

They’ll have to organise their workload to reflect the more regular meetings, providing updates at more regular intervals.

5. Follow up
Not everything can get done in 10 minutes, so you can flag certain issues for follow up meetings. This means that longer meetings will only be held on the important issues, instead of just having long meetings to discuss general issues.

Posted by Ashleigh Sharp