Your meetings can end on time 🕑
My colleagues and I have meetings. Loads of them. Until recently, most of our corporate gatherings took us longer than we plannend. One hour could easily take thirty minutes extra. That was pretty shitty, to be honest.
Every minute spend is one we never get back. It’s fair to say that time, and how we choose to use it, is of great value.
If we wanted to end our meeting as scheduled, we needed to change. Together with a small group of co-workers we sat down. We talked, decided, and got curious: what will happen if we count down to the end of meetings?
Why & how we count down ️⏳ 👀
If you’ve ever participated in a Design Sprint, you know what a TimeTimer is. It’s a nice little machine that visualizes how much time is left. An easy, but brilliant concept.
Originally it was created for kids who ask “How much longer?”. For us, it’s a great tool to make full grown humans aware of how much time they have left (to talk together).
What we’ve learned so far on counting down 🧐📋
We started this experiment with a few people. They would take a TimeTimer (or hourglass) to meetings, and introduce it to others. By trying and reviewing it we learned a lot and improved the process.
Here is how we do it now:
- Introduce the TimeTimer and share how much time you’re going to spend on the meeting. This simply makes everyone aware of time.
- Make sure everyone can see the TimeTimer. Hello! We’ve found hourglasses are very useful for this, they offer a nice 360º view.
- Take more time, if needed. Time’s up? But the team is still on a roll? No problem! The host of the meeting can ask the team if it’s ok to continu for 5m or 10m. Set the timer again. This device is not like a school bell: it should guide, not force. However, if you keep extending, you’ve bit of more than you can chew. Pick it up next time.
The result: finding focus 🎯
Counting down to the end of a meeting creates awareness on the matter of time. Because of this, people get to the point.
Also, making our time visible creates a shared responsibility.. The more one person talks, the less time others have to speak out.
In general, we see most of our meetings end on time. That’s good! Surely, we need to stick to our own rules, which is still a challenge sometimes.
Over time, I believe counting down to the end of meetings will become our new default.
How we discover what works for us ✨
We try other methods to find focus during meetings as well, like IDOARRT for preparation and structure.
These alternatives to our default behavior are part of a bunch of experiments we run at Clockwork, to improve our way of working. The method is called Tweak.
How we kick-off & review
Read about how we got our team’s groove on and how we review experiments in my other articles on Medium.
Still curious for more? That’s nice! Please contact me to ask me anything or provide some hyper-critical feedback. All good. I’d love to hear from you ✌️
Ps. For all you Dutchies: ik zoek teams om Tweak te testen, buiten de muren van Clockwork. Dat doe ik in mijn vrije tijd, omdat ik er snoeihard in geloof. Wil je meedoen? Stuur me een berichtje.
