Reclaim Your Time

How did your last week of meetings look? People on average spend 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings. THAT is the difference between work-life balance and not. 

Take control of your calendar or volunteer to your manager to help improve this on the team. 

• Block work time: Play defense. Block 2 hours daily when you are most productive for working and thinking. Guard this with your life. 

• Schedule office hours: Did your calendar fill up with one-off meetings? Schedule office hours with 15-minute appointments. 

• Create decision meetings: For each core project, schedule a weekly decision meeting with all key players. As big decisions come up, table them until that meeting.

• Rethink update meetings: Can everyone send their updates by email instead? It takes 5 minutes to write and 5 to read. If you need to meet, do it standing and right before lunch -- people will move quicker. 

• Audit recurring meetings: Can they be shortened to 30 min, every other week, or with a reduced attendee list? Meetings expand to fill the amount of time we give them. 

• Be ruthless with your attendee list: Only invite the people who need to be there and make sure all decision makers can attend. Every person over 7 invited to a meeting reduces effectiveness by 7%. 

• Practice good meeting hygiene: Send an agenda and materials out 24 hours in advance for pre-reads. Have someone take and send notes, creating a paper trail. You can send this to a wider audience than the meeting attendees as an easy update. 

Our most valuable resource is time, so let's reclaim it.  #timeamanagement