This meeting costs

0.00 €

Attendees

- 3 +

Hourly rate in €

- 45 +

Currency

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Keep meetings short!

Set the meeting time to some "uneven" shorter duration, e.g. 20 minutes instead of half an hour. Usually the last part of longer meetings does not really add much value as often it's just repeating or summarizing the discussion from the time before. Take notes, promise to send out a meeting summary afterwards (and keep that promise).

Shorter meetings also tend to enhance punctuality - when a meeting takes only 50 minutes instead of a full hour, meeting-hopping attendees can use the 10 minutes before the next meeting to grab a coffee and make their way to the next meeting room. This way the next meeting does not begin with lots of people just sitting idle and waiting.

Set a clear topic and agenda for the meeting. Provide all information you expect the attendees to know upfront. This way you can start your meeting right away without having to explain the topic over and over again. If an attendee did not invest the time to read your stuff before the meeting, maybe he is not really involved in that topic and shouldn't have been invited at all.

Invite less people!

In nearly every meeting there's at least one person who is not really needed for that meeting. While inviting, ask yourself whether the person you are about to add to the meeting is bringing real value/knowledge/experience to it. If this person just needs to know about the outcome, send the meeting summary later.

Don't invite those with the highest cost!

Usually those with higher pay ranks are those who finally have to take decisions, but are almost always not the ones that want to be bothered with all the details. So when your meeting is about details, don't bother your boss with discussions about details - but send her the management summary as a sound foundation to take the decision. Your boss will appreciate you didn't waste her time, but supported the decision taking process.

Be prepared!

Don't waste precious time by fiddling around with setting up your tools while the audience is waiting. Have your presentation open already, your computer connected to power and projector or have your screen-sharing enabled - all before the attendants gather around you.

Replace meetings with mails or chats!

Never underestimate the precision of written language. Sometimes a precisely crafted mail with links to further documents and a clear numbered list of questions or items to decide allows the recipients to better understand the topic and provide better contribution than a meeting with dozens of people chatting, deviating from the topic or having trouble finding the right words as the meeting language is not very familiar to them. If you don't like the idea of sending around mails and you have some corporate chat system at hand, try to use this.

Asynchronous communication does not force people to switch contexts at a defined time, but only when it suits them best. Working with teams spread across different timezones, asynchronous communication like mail or chat might be the only way to communicate without forcing some people to attend meetings very early or very late - which might not be the best time for their productivity.