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Guide to Running Productive, Time-Saving Meetings

I used to love meetings. There, I said it. This used to be hard for anyone to believe. But I used to love finally getting together with a group of people and collaborating and discussing a topic.


Well, after more than a decade in the workforce, my love for meetings has died. And I realized why recently:


People are running inefficient meetings.


Meetings have become a dirty word and everyone seems to be in meetings all day. Well. I'm convinced that if people were to run more efficient meetings, we would get half of our work day back.


Here are our top tips for ensuring your meetings are productive:


  1. Start and end on time Being late or ending meetings late signals that your time is more important than others'. I can't even begin to count the times that I've been in a meeting with a couple of senior leaders but could not get started until the last senior leader joined. I felt like I could see a taxi meter going up in price as each second went by.

  2. Set only as much time as you need We're so used to setting meetings up for 30 minutes or 1 hour because that's what online calendars default to. However, if you only need 10 minutes, why not only send it for that long? Also, please give everyone 5 minutes to travel to their next meeting or take a bio break. So really the default should be 25 minutes or 55 minutes and decrease the time as needed.

  3. Revisit the attendees Does everyone need to be at the meeting? Or do they just need to be informed after the meeting? We sometimes add people to meetings so they feel "included" but we then get into discussions with people who may not have all the information. I bet these people would appreciate it even more if they were just included in the meeting minutes with decisions made.


    However, this can go the opposite way as well - Do you have everyone you need at the meeting? Often, meetings become a waste of time when the decision maker is actually not in the room.


  4. Send an agenda and include an objective

    I will always include a "Meeting Objective" in my invites. If we're discussing more than one topic, I will also include an agenda. People like to come prepared to meetings. They don't want to be a deer caught in the headlights. I have also had people reject meeting invites because they read the agenda and they did not think they needed to attend. This saved both of us time and ensured I had the right people in the room.

  5. Send meeting minutes

    People usually hate this one - most likely because discussions go on for so long that you don't know what the final takeaway is. But if you follow all of the above, it should be easy to keep notes during the meeting and send the minutes right after the meeting. My preference is keeping the agenda and meeting minutes in one shared space that's linked in the event invite for all attendees to access.

  6. Start the meeting prepared If you start a 30-minute meeting and it takes you 5 minutes to set up, then the meeting should have only been for 25 minutes. I like to review my meetings for the day in the morning and open or print any documents I'll need. Then I can go from one meeting to the next knowing that I have the right documents available to me.


To help you run productive meetings, you can download your meeting agenda and meeting minutes templates below:



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