Making Meetings More Productive

Perhaps one of the most annoying times for productive people is meetings. Often meetings go on for a lot longer than necessary and never really accomplish all that they should. Organizing LA published a post about having stand up meetings and personally I think this is a brilliant idea for getting meetings done more effectively and achieving more in less time.

If you are responsible for a meeting then consider throwing out the chairs in your conference venue and instead have everyone stand while you discuss important matters. You will find that instead of everyone arguing about many subjects that are not really on topic they will keep to the subject of the meeting and try to get things decided as soon as possible so that they do not need to stand for very long.

On the Organizing LA blog, John Trosko says, "Because the meetings were so long someone on the team suggested we institute 'stand up meetings' instead of sitting at a traditional conference table, we took the chairs out of the room and ran meetings while standing on our feet. Well the length of the meetings DRASTICALLY dropped, because people didn't want to stand for long. Meetings went from 30-60 minutes to roughly 1/2 of that while still delivering meaty content."

Admittedly there are some meetings where this may not work, and if it is going to take a long time just to get through the items on the agenda then it probably is best to have chairs, but for those short meetings that are only meant to get through a few items try limiting the amount of time it takes by instituting stand up meetings.

Instead of having everyone use up your valuable time in meetings, cut the time it takes to get things decided and discuss agenda items by instituting stand up meetings. Stand up meetings make people feel like they need to get through the items quickly because they do not want to stand for long. Sit down meetings are often long and unproductive.