Do Yourself & Your Company a Favor: Cut Meetings in Half

Today, I want to give you all solid, practical, actionable advice for your organization, and more importantly for yourself: cut all your meetings in half.

One of the greatest vulnerabilities for any organization is meeting length. As a matter of fact, I still feel that my agency VaynerMedia is not where it should be in this regard. I’m hoping to focus on that more heavily moving forward into 2016.

When you really break it down, time is the asset. Think about how humans interact with time: they fit into the timeframe all the work they need to do based on the time that was set. If you have a thirty minute meeting, you can use up a lot of that time grabbing a coffee, bullshitting about last night’s Super Bowl, and checking your phone four or five times, yet still having time for the pertinent part of the meeting.

If that same meeting was scheduled for fifteen minutes, you would still get the same amount of work done. It would have one less sentence about the half time show, one less funny anecdote, but you would play within the confines of the time allocated. This is human nature. We do what we can with the time we are given. We want to make sure it gets done, so we make it work.

But in a world with cell phones and so many other distractions, meetings are getting worse at this, not better. Starting as soon as possible, go one month cutting all meetings in half, or at least by thirty or forty percent. You will be stunned by how impactful it can be.

The tweet below is what really prompted me to start thinking about this this morning:

What Ben says is so true, and this tactic I am discussing, of cutting things down, is what allows me to scale meetings with all my employees. People always question the fact that I truly do meet one on one with all my employees at some point in their time at Vayner, many of them multiple times. My reply is always the same: of course I do. Because I can. And the reason I can is because I have learned how to cut meetings down to exactly what they need to be, and that’s not thirty minutes every single time.

By making five or seven minute meetings, sometimes they go eleven. Sometimes they’re only three minutes. But you’re able to reverse engineer through using the context as the end point.

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