The 25 Minute Meeting: Half the Time, Double the Impact

By Donna McGeorge

Sharpen your focus and tighten your time frames to get more done in less time

The 25 Minute Meeting goes beyond “cut to the chase” and shows you how to take back your work day with smarter planning and more productive action. Meetings have become a de facto way of working, and as they pile up and stretch to interminable lengths, they eat up our days and sink productivity—if they are poorly planned and run. Done well, meetings are short, sharp, productive affairs that provide critical time and space for the interactions that drive business forward. This book shows you how to effectively and efficiently recover your time with a roadmap to the 25-minute meeting.

A clear framework walks you through the entire meeting process, with emphasis on timing and focus, with illustrative case studies showing how real-world meetings have transformed from painful to purposeful with a few simple changes. From purging the invite list, to shutting down irrelevant tangents and facilitating more efficient communication, this book can help you reclaim your lost hours without sacrificing collaboration.

• Learn the art and science of conducting short, useful, purposeful meetings
• Follow a clear framework for meeting planning, preparation, and participation
• Assess your meetings’ effectiveness using helpful checkpoints in each chapter
• Boost your meetings’ impact with variety and visuals—without adding unnecessary time

A well-run meeting is a goldmine of opportunity for Getting Things Done; it is where the diverse set of talents on your team come together into a whole of achievement—it is your most valuable commodity. It’s time to leave dusty, boring, time-sucking meetings in the past and revolutionize the way we come together. The 25 Minute Meeting shows you a fresh, more productive approach to working, cooperating, collaborating, and communicating the 21st century way.

The 25-Minute Meeting is the first book in Donna McGeorge’s It’s About Time series. With The 25-Minute Meeting, you’ll learn to give your meetings purpose and stop them wasting your time; with The First 2 Hours, you’ll find the best time of the day to do your most productive work; and with The 1-Day Refund, you’ll discover how to give yourself the extra capacity to think, breathe, live and work.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Aug 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780730359258

Book preview

About the author

Donna McGeorge makes work work.

She is passionate about enhancing the large amount of time we spend in our workplace (too much, for many) to ensure it is effective and productive, as well as enjoyable.

Donna has worked with managers and leaders throughout Australia and Asia–Pacific for over 20 years. She delivers practical skills, training, workshops and facilitation to corporates — such as Nissan Motor Company, Jetstar, Medibank Private and Ford Motor Company — so they learn to manage their people well and produce great performance and results.

Her CV reads like her eclectic record collection (yes, classic vinyl): Manager of Theatre, Sports & Concert Tours for the UK-based Keith Prowse; Asia–Pacific Organisational Development Manager for Ford Motor Company in Shanghai, China; as well as roles at Telstra, Qantas, Ernst & Young and Ansett.

She lives on 20 acres in Heathcote, Victoria, a region known for its world-class shiraz, but her most creative moments come while sipping tea on her verandah, gazing at the rolling hills, alongside her husband, Steve, and dog, Prudence.

Donna believes that workplaces are complex, but not hard. More often than not it’s getting the simple things right, consistently, that has the greatest impact.

She also knows that when we decide to be intentional, we can surprise ourselves with what we can achieve. Read on and you’ll soon see.

www.donnamcgeorge.com

Acknowledgements

Wow! This has been such an interesting ride and there are so many people who have been part of the journey.

The team at Wiley — and what a team! Ingrid and Lucy, you understood my vision for this book and helped me to bring it to life. I am so grateful to you for being part of a turning point in my career and life.

Kelly Irving — I could not have written this book without you, particularly in those moments where I was having a bad day and felt like nothing was working. A short text and things got right back on track. Your insight and intelligence are nothing short of extraordinary, along with your direct and on-point feedback.

Tracey Ezard, Lynne Cazaly and Maree Burgess — my brains trust. You got me through the ups and downs of creative flow, fed me an appropriate beverage at those times and spent long days on the couch (and phone) listening to my ramblings, being my sounding board and kicking my butt when needed. This will long be remembered as the book that was birthed in Bali. You talented and amazing women have my back at every turn.

Alexandra Martindale — the thing about being a creative type is that you have lots of ideas, every day, about things you could do: products to market, books to write and opportunities to explore. Alex, you keep me focused and on track. You also kept the business going and our social media presence alive while I had my head down writing. Any time I popped my head up with a ‘Hey, I’ve had an idea!’, you would acknowledge, record and then remind me of my focus.

Emma McGeorge — my darling girl. You have quickly discovered the challenges of the modern corporate worker and have been waiting with bated breath for the publishing of this book: ‘Mum! The world NEEDS this book!’ You are the inspiration for much of my writing as I strive to create a better corporate working environment for everyone, and particularly you.

Finally, and anyone who knows me so GETS this … to my wonderful husband of 27 years, Steve McGeorge. To put it simply, you are of service. When my head is down, I sometimes don’t notice that you have swapped out an empty cup of tea for a fresh one, or popped a snack by the computer to keep me going when I forget to stop and eat. Your unconditional love and support has made not just this book, but the life we lead possible. I could not do anything that I do without you. I’m blessed.

Introduction

We all know it.

Meetings suck.

They suck up our energy and enthusiasm for life at work.

Many of us are time-poor, stressed out, overwhelmed and on the verge of ‘death by meetings’. Our calendars are full of irrelevant or tedious back-to-back ‘catch-ups’ and our email is overloaded with messages screaming for attention.

Every time we get a chance to breathe and catch up on some ‘real work’, our computers ding! to remind us of another pointless meeting that is starting in five minutes.

Last year, I put the following post up on Facebook:

Meetings seem to be the de facto way of working yet they aren’t always as effective as they could be. In fact, most people roll their eyes at the mention of meetings … I’m researching for my new book and would love to know what is the one thing you HATE MOST about workplace meetings?

Top 10 meeting pet peeves

Here are the top 10 responses I got back:

That you have a meeting to get ready for the meeting, and a meeting after to go over the meeting (like having to clean the house before the house cleaner comes).

People showing up late. People showing up unprepared. People showing up who don’t need to be there. People not showing up at all.

An agenda not sent in sufficient time to allow people to prepare properly. Then, not even sticking to the agenda. Or lacking a clear commitment to time frames set for the agenda.

Looking at phones rather than being present.

People who leave midway because they have ‘more important matters’. (They tend to be serial offenders.)

Managers who turn up late while everyone sits around waiting, like their time is far more important.

Lack of clarity as to the purpose of the meeting.

Never having time OUTSIDE meetings to get anything done. Senior managers seem triple booked from nine until five, and they are exhausting themselves after hours trying to ‘work’.

A meeting that gets hijacked by two people who spend the group’s shared meeting time discussing something that should be discussed at another time between just the two of them.

Lack of clear action items. Like, what are we supposed to do next?

This list is by no means exhaustive. As more people saw the post, the more (and angrier) responses I got back.

It’s time to stop the meeting madness.

What I’m about to show you is that you don’t have to suffer like this. There is a solution to all of this meeting mess, and it’s a lot simpler than you might think.

We need meetings. We need them at work because when they work, they are valuable. Clear actions get set, decisions are made and the whole business moves forward.

But what we don’t need is for meetings to waste our time, money and resources.

What we need is a 25-minute meeting. A meeting that is short, sharp and productive. A meeting that gets the job done efficiently. A meeting that gets more value in way less time.

Stop for a minute and look at your calendar. How many of your meetings are 60 minutes or more? By choosing to do 25-minute meetings, you will free up a large chunk of time to get your day-to-day work done. Or even just have space to think!

Too often I have heard people say that they spend all day in meetings, so their evenings (when they should be with their families, friends or enjoying leisure time) are spent doing their actual work or catching up on emails they have missed.

With 25-minute meetings, your team members and colleagues will thank you for the time you gift them back. Your organisation will thank you for the money you will save them — around $5775 per week, if you do the following maths.

According to Glass Door, a company that provides average salary information across a range of roles and industries, the average salary of a manager is $110 000.

They say that there are approximately 75 people at this level in a number of large organisations, and they spend between 35 per cent and 50 per cent of their time in meetings.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s work with a 40-hour week. (‘Dreaming!’ I hear you say; but stay with me.) Say 7 managers spend about 15 hours per week (or 3 hours per day) in meetings. Here’s what it will cost:

7 managers ×

$55 per hour ×

15 hours per week =

$5775 per week

Remember, that’s just in a week. Imagine how serious these numbers start to get over the course of a year. AND this is not taking into account any opportunity cost!

In fact, a 2014 Bain & Company study of time budgeting at large corporations found that a single

Reviews for The 25 Minute Meeting

[Alexander Sjöstrand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some practical tips and processes for all the steps you need before, during and after the meeting. I've done 25/45min meetings for a few months and they make hell of a difference in pure time. With the content of this book you can get more value out if those times.