In most companies meetings are broken. You and I both know it. We organize and attend meetings that take too long, are unstructured, involve too much rambling and not enough follow-up. We meet for the sake of meeting, not out of necessity. We allow individuals to hijack the meeting so it takes twice as long as it is supposed to. For the few minutes per day that we’re not in meetings, we’re being consistently interrupted. Yet, we’re still expected to complete all of our work on time even if we spend the majority of our life in meetings.

Does this sound like a conversation you might have had recently with a co-worker?

I know this has happened to me. I know that I’ve been both the culprit and victim of broken meetings. But, lately, I have become increasingly restrictive of how easy I’ll agree to a meeting without questioning the need to meet and the length of time required. Too often, as I’m sure you’ve experience, hour long meetings are scheduled because it sounds like a nice, round number.

Meetings don’t have to be the source of this much frustration. Meetings don’t have to zap your team’s productivity. Meetings don’t have to suck!

Now, this isn’t to say that meetings aren’t necessary. They are very much needed, when they’re structured, are respectful of your time, involve follow-up, and aren’t just a meeting to meet about the last meeting you had.

If you’re stuck in an organization that enjoys meeting just to meet, how can you fix it? How can you regain back your precious time?

Merlin Mann has come to the rescue once again. A few years ago he began preaching from tall mountains on how each of us could regain control on our inboxes with his, now famous, Inbox Zero speech. Now Merlin wants to help you fix broken meetings so that they return to be useful allocations of your time.

Merlin recently publicly rolled out this new presentation during a session at Twitter HQ. The entire presentation is a little more than an hour long but is worth every minute of your time.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Merlin shares 10 patterns for improving meetings.

10 Patterns to Improve Meetings

1. Purpose
2. Agenda
3. Grazing
4. Edges
5. Guests
6. Timekeeper
7. No Ratholes
8. Focus
9. Follow-Up
10. Consistency

What are your thoughts about broken meetings? Did you find a nugget or two of actionable information that you can take back to your organization and implement?

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Photo Credit: Kevin Lawyer

Right about this point you’re probably nodding your head up and down admitting that you’re experiencing this same issue.  It’s not surprising because the modern workplace has become addicted to meetings and other forms of interruptions.

This is a consistent issue for me even though my team tries to run as lean as possible and reduce the number of meetings and miscellaneous interruptions we have. However, when I’m not traveling, a normal week will have 40-60 meetings appear on my calendar. One of the reasons for this is because we’re a fast-growing company with big ambitions and a lot of moving projects that require our attention while the other part is that we have weekly status calls with each of our clients and I lead the majority of these calls.

As more meetings and interruptions have continued to find their way into my work day, I’ve learned to block out time on my calendar that is marked “DO NOT SCHEDULE!”  This allows me to schedule blocks of time to get work done instead of only small windows of time.

With how often I travel, I’ve also learned how to be productive from anywhere and how to leverage any time available even if it is only 15 minutes.  This has lead me to become very good at getting work done with short pockets of time in between meetings and at home.  Even if I have a day without a lot of meetings, I have found that I am more productive on projects when I’m workshifting because I find that I can focus more because it’s just me, my laptop and some great music.

Just as I was thinking about this while sitting on my couch doing work on a Sunday afternoon, I came across an interview with Jason Fried,co-author of Rework (affiliate link) and Founder of 37Signals where he addresses exactly this issue. Jason describes some of the tactics that his team uses at the 37Signals office and offers some tactical advice that you could implement into your office.

Have you broken your company of their addiction to meetings and other interruptions? If so, what were the tactics you used?

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