Beware the hour-long meeting

Have you ever been in an hour-long meeting that should have taken 15 minutes?

Google Calendar is partly to blame (those of you on Outlook aren’t safe quite yet — read on). Google sets your default event length to 60 minutes. By clicking on a start time, Google sets the end time an hour later:

When you keep this default, you’re starting from the position that you need an hour of your participants’ time for every meeting you hold.

You should change this default to 15 minutes, the shortest time Google allows. We believe that meetings should be as short as possible, no longer. If meeting organizers need an hour of your time, they must prove it. When we set our default to 15 minutes, we send a signal that we value our attendees’ time.

Not all meetings are created equal. Some topics require intense, detailed discussion. This might take longer than 15 minutes, and that’s OK. So how do we know how long a given meeting should be?

First, if you don’t know what you’re meeting about, there’s no way for you to estimate how long it will take. If the meeting organizer doesn’t provide an agenda, ask for it. If they don’t, or can’t articulate why they’re asking for your time, don’t attend.

Given an agenda, a meeting’s length should be the sum of the estimated time allotted to agenda items.

Spreadsheets can add necessary order and clarity to agendas

Agendas take time for organizers to create. But it’s an investment for the collective team. What might have been an hour-long meeting (remember the default) is now 20 minutes. Across a team, that saves hours.

If an organizer hasn’t thought about how long a meeting should be, they are, again, likely using the defaults, or just “putting time on the calendar”. No matter what you cover, or how long that’s supposed to take, you’re going to fill the time. Demand organizers cut the time so you have less of it to fill.

We want to help

Do you manage people? Rate That Meeting will show you whether any of them have a default event length that’s too long:

If your direct reports themselves have teams, we’ll show you what percent of those teams can cut their default length:

Want to see the meetings that are taking up the bulk of your team’s time? We have that, too:

For each meeting, we suggest action items to help make them less expensive

As a meeting participant, you should be defensive with your time. If an organizer could improve their time management, Rate That Meeting helps you tell them (all feedback is anonymous):

With Rate That Meeting, you can provide feedback via Slack or email

If any of this interests you, give Rate That Meeting a try. We’re just starting to develop solutions to these problems and have a lot more in store for the future.