Make Meetings Efficient: No New Information Rule

Time Tips: Meetings Tip #1, No New Information

Meetings tend to waste enormous amounts of time, simply because people don't plan and execute them properly.

Most people who are sitting in meetings may prefer an execution--as in "shoot me, please!"-- to five more minutes of an experience often equated with getting a root canal operation.

Think about your meetings, and plan them ahead of time. Here's your first tip.

Unless it's an informational meeting, follow the "no new information" rule at each meeting. If you do not employ this rule, start doing so and you will see remarkable results. Why such improvement?

When people have to sit and read information during a meeting, everyone is doing so at different rates. Some people feel rushed, others feel bored. In such an environment, people rarely have the time or motivation to think about the information, come up with ideas of their own to effectively utilize the information, or formulate the proper questions or responses.

Consequently, the topic the new information addresses cannot be "put to bed." It's going to contaminate this meeting and then bleed over into the next.

Essentially, ambushing people with new information nearly always makes the meeting a waste of everyone's time.

What to do, instead? Before the meeting, distribute all reports and other things that people need to give their undivided attention to. How long before the meeting? This depends on the complexity of the information and how much time people will need to digest it. Waiting until the day of the meeting is probably not going to help. Organize and distribute with the goal of communicating, and you'll get the timing right.

More thoughts on time management

The phrase "time management" is an unfortunate language quirk. You can't really manage time. It just is. You can't gain time, create time, or even lose time. Time is what it is, regardless of what we do. And, paradoxically, many common "time management" techniques and practices are timewasters because they divert limited resources (such as time) to the wrong things.

It would be better to say "time allocation" or "activity management" "time usage" or some other phraseology to indicate that it's not time itself you're managing but how you use the time that exists. But we'll use the common terminology here to avoid confusion.

Some things time management is not:

Being more efficient. Suppose you become very efficient at making buggy whips. Does this fact mean you are managing your time well?
Getting more done in a given amount of time. Getting more done of what? And to what degree of quality? If you rake the leaves on a lawn from one side to the other all day long, does that mean you are a good time manager?
Being able to juggle multiple priorities. Instead of juggling priorities, assign priorities. First tend to the urgent things, then the most important things.
Mastering multi-tasking. This concept conflicts with what we know about the human brain. If you buy into this self-defeating, time-wasting, quality-killing ideology, you might also be interested in practicing solo flight by flapping your arms frantically.
Working faster. No, this mode is how you make mistakes that you subsequently have to spend more time fixing.

Some things good time management involves:

Deciding what to do. This is trickier than it sounds. Which is why there are time management experts.
Deciding what not to do. This is even trickier than deciding what to do. Which is why there are time managers and why discipline is a huge, huge factor in accomplishing this.
Deciding what to do when, and in what order. In essence, prioritization.
Determining the scope, goals, and metrics for each activity you undertake. In this area, we the find most room for improvement. Precision here allows you to avoid waste on the one hand, and falling short on the other.
Planning out the work, task, project, or activity such that you determine the necessary steps to quality completion. That is, what must you do to meet the intended goal and quality metrics?
Identifying unnecessary steps. Get this right, and you can cut your wasted hours significantly.
Figuring out what resources to use. Not all resources applicable to a task are equal. Picking the right tool for the job saves time, improves quality, and makes life less stressful.

We've highlighted only some of the factors involved in good time management. We actually teach extreme time management, which is a methodology that allows you to make effective use of your time almost second nature. You don't need a complicated system. Our system puts many of the variables on autopilot, so you have more time to do what you need to do. Our system goes way beyond most other systems in results, yet is far simpler.

Contact us for a presentation to your organization: comments @ mindconnection.com (remove the spaces after pasting into your e-mail client's "to" box.