Improving Meeting Efficiency: A Proposal

The goal of this document is to propose ways to enhance the effectiveness of any meeting.

Throughout my career, I have observed that meetings often last as long as the time allocated to them. My hypothesis, derived from this observation, is that many meetings could be shorter by following a small set of rules, which I describe below.

To begin, I would like to reference an impactful article by C. Northcote Parkinson, who investigated this topic scientifically as early as 1955. Parkinson begins the article with the story of an elderly lady of leisure who could spend an entire day sending a postcard. For example, she spends an hour deciding which postcard to send. Writing the text, finding a stamp, and choosing whether to take an umbrella to the post office consumes significant time for a task that busy people might complete in three minutes, Parkinson states link to Parkinson’s article.

The primary purpose of a meeting should be to make one or more decisions. Information sharing and topic discussion without clear goals and decision-making should be avoided. My investigation into information-sharing meetings reveals that the shared information is often useful only for a subset of attendees, thus wasting the time of the rest. In contrast, information should be shared in writing due to several advantages:

Clarity: Writing about a topic brings clarity to the writer, as the text needs to be understandable by the target audience directly without raising questions.
Worth Evaluation: Sharing information in writing forces individuals to consider whether it is worth investing time in creating a compelling text to distribute the respective piece of information.
Reusability: The produced text can be reused whenever the information needs to be provided to others, avoiding additional meetings and saving time for the original distributor of the information.

As a final point, I would like to emphasize that a meeting is very costly for an organization. Let’s consider a rough calculation of the cost of a meeting with six high-paid Amazon employees:

Rough Cost Calculation:

Assume each employee earns an average salary of $150,000 per year.
The average number of work hours per year is 2,080.
Hourly wage per employee = $150,000 / 2,080 = approximately $72.12.
Meeting duration = 1 hour.
Total cost for six employees = 6 employees * $72.12/hour = $432.72.

This calculation highlights the financial impact of meetings and underscores the importance of conducting them efficiently.

Rules for Efficient Meetings

Efficient Meeting Video

Have an agenda.
Each agenda item should include:
- A clear goal written down before the meeting.
- A written problem statement available before the meeting.
- A time-box in minutes to make a decision.
Avoid information sharing (distribute information in writing).
Ensure the decision-maker for each goal is present.
Topics that cannot be decided within the time box will be deferred.
Appoint a facilitator for each meeting.
Park off-topic discussions in a designated “parking lot.”