Your 25-minute meeting roadmap

At the heart of this book is the message that you can be a hell of a lot more productive in your meetings.

Even if you can’t get every single meeting down to 25 minutes, when you apply these principles, you will almost definitely reduce the amount of time you are wasting in unproductive meetings.

The best thing you could do after reading this book is decide right now that you are going to start doing 25-minute meetings.

On the other hand, the worst thing you could do is to move from back-to-back 60-minute meetings to back-to-back 25-minute meetings.

Remember, this is about halving the time while doubling the value, so that you need to meet less and have time to get work done.

So figure C (overleaf) is an immediate plan of action for you to follow.

An illustration shows ‘your 25 minute meeting roadmap’ as follows: 1. Purpose: why are we here? 2. People: who do we need? 3. Process: how will we do the work? 4. Prepared: I’m ready 5. Punctual: I’m here 6. Present: I’m focused 7. Participate: we contribute 8. Produce: we do the work 9. Proceed we follow through

Figure C: immediate plan of action

  1. Set yourself up for success by asking yourself:
    • What is the purpose of the meeting?
    • Who are the right people to be there?
    • What process will we follow to get the outcomes?
  2. Show up ready to go by setting clear rules of engagement and make sure you:
    • send out a focused agenda well in advance to give everyone time to prepare
    • be clear on the start time and start on time, no matter what
    • ban (or at least limit) tech during the meeting.
  3. Have everyone step up and share their genius with the group by:
    • connecting with everyone at the beginning to increase participation ...

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