Your Friend Toby | Reading / Listening time: 2 minutes
You hunt meetings. Be as critical of meetings as you are of the concert or movie you pay to see.
It’s Friday, three pm. Are you dashing out that last email? Polishing the deck you’ll present on Tuesday? Or are you already slacking off, on Tinder setting up your date for the weekend?
No.
You, my friend, are acting like the strategic genius you are.
You are creating time.
On Friday, at three pm you start the timer. Twenty-nine minutes, counting down. You study your agenda for Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Then for the week after, through Friday again. You are hunting meetings.
Not just any meetings; you seek those meetings that exist without a purpose. Time you demand from others simply because you can.
For every meeting you own, ask yourself three questions:
- What is the goal?
- What is the agenda?
- Who must attend? (Not should, must.)
If you cannot answer one of these questions, you have a decision to make:
cancel or elevate.
The purpose of any meeting is simple: bring together people to discuss anything that contributes to attaining a common goal.
If there is no shared goal, it’s a catch-up. That’s fine. Just make sure you’re aware of it.
If there is no agenda, it’s about everything. That’s not a meeting, that’s a town hall.
If everyone can attend, it’s a bar.
Cancel meetings that have no goal for, and free up time to work.
Elevate the most important meetings of your week, by completing these sentences:
- By the end of this meeting we will have …
- To do this we must discuss these items: …
- To make a decision, these are the people who need must attend: …
Try this today.
Go through one meeting and experience the step change this approach has for you. To be a leader, you must lead. And the best place to start leading, is the meetings that you initiate.
Listen to my talk on Leading Impactful Meetings for Google Developers.
Your Friend Toby 