Meetings consume a big portion of the knowledge worker’s week, and are notoriously unproductive (small wonder, what with everybody doing email). Improving meeting effectiveness is therefore a big deal; I’ve seen it done right with great positive impact, and the converse too. It takes some doing… but there is one way meetings can be improved immediately: by abandoning the tyranny of the one-hour slot.

Most meetings in the world are set for an hour or two, simply because we all live by the clock, and it is calibrated in hours. This is also reflected in most calendars, whether paper or software based. And so, most people have their calendar applications set for a default 1-hour meeting duration. I’m sure you’ve never seen an invitation for a meeting from 10:00 AM to 10:38 AM… even if 38 minutes would suffice, you set it for the full hour, then fritter away the remaining time. In addition to losing the “padding” time (which reminds me of the inefficient use of disk space for file storage in blocks, but hey, I’m a techie) – there is another issue: with many people in back to back meetings, there is no gap between meetings – and you do need a few minutes to go from conference room to conference room, or (even if it’s all on the phone) to summarize your notes and collect your thoughts; so meetings tend to begin late.

The solution, of course, is to shorten meetings to less than an hour. I’ve seen a number of approaches here:

· Some companies simply use a 30 minute slot as the default. This makes for efficient meetings, though it leaves the gap problem unsolved.

· At Intel we had a policy, driven by senior management, to set meetings for 50 minutes, allowing people to get to the next one in good time. It was not always adhered to, but it had an impact and helped instill a mindset of punctuality.

· TimeBridge – makers of a wonderful meeting scheduling product I may discuss in a future post – have just announced the “45-Minute Meeting Movement”, an effort to help champion more efficient meetings. They have a blog you may want to keep an eye on; and they’ve made a change in their product by setting the default meeting time in the TimeBridge meeting scheduler to 45 minutes instead of sixty. This formalizes the previous idea, and should help users stay on track.

· Of course, there’s the story of the company whose CEO had all the chairs removed from the conference rooms… a bit drastic perhaps but definitely conducive to brevity!

If you’ve witnessed other methods, let us know. Any tip in this space can save millions…