Stop Having One-Hour Meetings

By Xavier Mula

Venture capitalist Brad Feld refuses to acquiesce to the typical one-hour meeting block. He’s found that meetings tend to fill up whatever amount of time you’ve allotted for them, thereby decreasing the productivity factor:

If you schedule a meeting for an hour, it’s remarkable to me how often it takes an hour, even when it doesn’t need to. Three hour board meetings, especially when board members have traveled to them, take – wait for the drum roll – three hours.

Just because your Outlook calendar defaults to one-hour meeting invitations, or the precedent in your organization is to meet for an hour at a time, doesn’t mean you can’t question the status quo. In an age when we’re overloaded with information and our time is more valuable than ever, unnecessarily long meetings are the biggest time-suck.

Feld now schedules all his commitments in 30-minute increments:

I’ve tried it all. 60 minutes. 15 minutes. 5 minutes. 45 minutes. 37 minutes. The only thing that I’ve found that works is 30 minutes. If I schedule for 15 minutes, I inevitably have too many things in a day and get completely exhausted. If I schedule for more than 30 minutes, I find myself twiddling my thumbs and trying to get finished with the meeting. 30 minutes seems to be the ideal amount to get any type of meeting done.

What if the people with whom you’re meeting haven’t gotten the memo that those meetings should be as short and sweet as possible? Feld takes matters into his own hands:

I try to end everything when it’s done. I jump right in and finish when we are finished. When you give things 30 minutes, you don’t have time to futz around with intros and catch ups. When someone starts this way, I break in and say as politely as I can, “What’s on your mind?” On the phone, I minimize chit chat and just try to get to the point. And, after five minutes when we are done, I revel in the notion that I’ve got 25 minutes to do whatever I want.

Meetings don’t have to be a detractor from your work day if you schedule them right. Aim to never ask yourself, post-meeting, “Did that really need to take an hour?”

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