How I Saved 8 hrs a Month Optimizing One Meeting.
The ultimate guide to freedom from meetings.
Meetings are the worst.
No another meeting.
UGH, can it just be over?
These are some of the things I hear people say about meetings.
These feelings aren’t wrong.
Because most meetings are a cluster, you know what of people who talk over each other with no real agenda.
And even if there’s an agenda, no one follows it anyway.
For me, it’s about efficiency.
Meetings can be incredibly efficient problem-solving opportunities and culture-building centers.
Here’s what I did recently to shave 8 hours off one of our internal meetings.
The meeting at hand is a content review meeting.
Lots of moving parts.
Lots of people involved.
Suggestions, corrections, and ideas all have to be implemented.
All of this was happening in the meeting, which isn’t ideal.
Because that can stretch the meeting 2 hours +
Most people couldn’t stay focused on the meeting with this length of time.
My first step in optimizing a meeting is creating a system for pre-meeting prep using a project management tool.
I like Trello.
Any tasks associated with that meeting went into Trello.
For content, it was a complete head-to-toe review.
Our system works differently for content, which I’ll explore in another post.
But in a nutshell, it is very data-driven and viral-focused, which is why we produce winning, disruptive, and viral content.
With that being said, each week needs a new production timeline.
On Trello, that production timeline is tracked from ideation to finish.
Along the way, each person responsible is assigned their responsibility in the timeline and held accountable.
Each piece is ideated using Trello and then shared in Slack for discussion, comments, concerns, etc.
The content review meeting is at the end of the week.
Pre-meeting, the team is responsible for reviewing each piece, noting any issues, and highlighting them on the Trello board.
The sole purpose of the meeting at this point is to review issues needing revision and solve them quickly.
The key to removing time in meetings is to create systems and accountability to optimize meeting preparation.
This requires good leadership.
Strong management skills.
SOPs and accountability.
This stems from the concept of the Adox of Entrepreneurship.
You want freedom, but to create freedom, you must have structure.
Even though structure seems contradictory to freedom.
Without structure, freedom is impossible.
Therefore, structure creates freedom.