My thanks to my friend Ian Crocker for drawing my attention today to an interesting article on meetings written in the Daily Telegraph. You can find a link to the article below but here are 3 quick take-aways for you:

The article covers 3 principles which also happen to be in our making meetings work smarter training, which incorporates a number of key philosophies, principles and processes to get much better results from our meetings.

In brief the 3 principles covered in the article are:

  1. Replace most of your management control type meetings, especially on project or goal progress, with greater ongoing visibility on the planning, execution and delivery of agreed activities, using the technology your business is already invested in. Such meetings should be the exception and not the weekly / monthly norm! We know many ways to achieve this.
  2. This principle requires a paradigm shift on what our Outlook, Lotus Notes or other team calendar is for. Schedule your management of high priority workload first and meetings last each day.  It always amazes me that people still consider their calendar to be primarily for meetings and reminders when they have shed-loads of work to do each day!
  3. If you have the authority and responsibility for a team, consider implementing a ‘No internal meetings’ day – or if that is not practical – a no internal meetings morning – to liberate your people to focus on doing uninterrupted, high value work. This, obviously, goes beyond a ban on formal meetings and extends into permission to say ‘Not now!’ and even, selectively, to put phones to voicemail within in these time slots.

Meetings can be a major productivity pirate for people juggling and managing high priority workloads. You might also want to read a few pointers on getting more from creative or problem solving meetings .

You can read the full Daily Telegraph article here:

Of course, you can always ask me about how our proven practical training and support makes a major, measurable difference in how teams manage shared results with fewer meetings here