This post is simply Hixie's Meeting philosophy post from late last year, but formatted as a checklist. I have reordered some of the items to group them by triage-time (when a new invitation is received), meeting time (running the meeting), and other (anything else).
Seems like using the relatively quiet time of early-in-the-year days to review how I'm spending my time could be a great use of time in itself!
Triage-time
- Decline meetings aggressively.
- Decline any meeting without an explicit agenda (I make exceptions for my immediate manager).
- Decline any meeting where the agenda doesn't seem relevant to your work.
- Decline any recurring meeting with more than one other person.
- Decline meetings that conflict with your breaks unless the person has explicitly reached out first.
Meeting-time
- End meetings promptly once the agenda is resolved.
- Always leave a meeting when it reaches the end of its scheduled time.
- Never start a meeting late.
- If people are missing, start on time anyway. This is especially true for any meeting with large groups of people.
Other
- Always try to resolve issues by e-mail or chat first if possible.
- Keep track of how productive recurring meetings are being. If they're not productive, cancel them. If they're only occasionally productive, reduce the frequency.
- Have a hard out every day, stop working at that time.
- Create fake buffer meetings so that you've got guaranteed breaks.
- Aggressively defrag your calendar to make it look like what you want.
Happy calendar defrag!
Tags:
checklist
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