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Make Better Use of Your Meeting Times
Do you schedule your days like a manager or a maker?
How long do you think the average meeting should be? Is it 1 hour? 30 minutes? Or you could say 55 or 25 minutes to allow us 5 extra minutes to get to our next meeting that is artificially too long?
No matter what industry you work in, we’ve long accepted these time slots as just how work gets done. We sometimes get skeptical to assume it’s a mistake if we see a meeting scheduled for 15 minutes or (gasp!) maybe even less!
But maybe it’s less about the duration of the meeting, and more about designing your schedule around the work that you do.
The Average Meeting
The average meeting time in the workplace is between 31–60 minutes. If you do the math, that means you can cram in 8–16 meetings in the typical 8-hour workday. But should you schedule that many meetings? Maybe you could if the meetings were shorter, more efficient. But what works for you may not work for the people you’re scheduling meetings with.
Manager Schedule
Paul Graham (of Y Combinator fame) has described schedules in two different types. There is the manager schedule and the maker schedule. The first type of schedule is the manager schedule. This is the…