The Art of Doing

11 Tips for Having Great Meetings from
Some of the World’s Most Productive People

A recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 800 hours a year, for a grand total of 4 years of your life over your career. Here are 10 strategies to get your office meeting off life support. Plus a bonus tip on meetings from Mark Zuckerberg.

meetingsMark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Nilofer Merchant, Clay Shirky, Valentina Rice, Guy Kawasaki and others, know about getting things done, being productive and keeping a crowd engaged. So when they talk, we should listen.

recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 800 hours a year. For a grand total over an entire career of–are you sitting down?–37,440 hours of meetings. That’s more than 4 years of your precious time.

There are few tried and true strategies for running productive meetings: Be prepared, have a leader, an agenda, a fixed time to start and stop, a conclusion and plan to follow up. But if we have to sit around in a windowless conference room for 9,000 hours, can’t we come up with something more . . . engaging?

Here are 10 strategies to get your office meeting off life support. Plus a bonus tip on meetings from Mark Zuckerberg: Continue reading “11 Tips for Having Great Meetings from
Some of the World’s Most Productive People”