Do you respect other people’s time? Do they respect yours? All too often lately I have observed meetings that start 5-10 minutes late. Consider a meeting of 6 people that starts 10 minutes late – in effect an hour of worktime has been wasted.
Are you constantly late for meetings?
If you are constantly late for meetings, then perhaps you are not respecting your own time well. We all need time between meetings to consolidate the outputs from one meeting and prepare for the next. Running from one straight into the other is not conducive to an effective meeting, and turning up late is far from efficient!
Parkinson’s Law tells us that no matter what time we allocate to an activity it will expand to fill the time. This applies to meetings as well. Recently I have tried to reduce the duration of my meetings slightly, allowing time between them to prepare for the next.
Make meetings shorter and give yourself time to breathe
So instead of allocating the standard hour to every meeting that you have, try allocating 45 minutes or even 30 minutes, and allowing yourself a breather before the next one. You might just find that your meetings are much more effective, and you regain time in your workday that you didn’t expect.