You start your day with a meeting and directly step into another and another and another. Never ending back to back meetings seems to be order of the day in most companies today.
However, lately there seems to be a mild shift in the approach. More and more people are going towards holding shorter meetings and skipping unnecessary ones. They rather technology to use. Keeping meetings not longer than 15 minutes makes you more productive, believe many CEOs today. They are indeed right. Meetings don't need to be more 30 minutes to establish the mission and get updates.
We all have 1,440 minutes a day and work an average of 45 hours a week. However, most of us consider about 16 of those hours to be unproductive. People spend 5.5 hours each week in meetings and think 71 percent of meetings aren't productive. Meetings make your mind wander when stretched way too much. Your attention span reduces as you grow up. And the worst is, it evades you when you need it the most. So, it is better to skip things that lead to poor focus. Concentration improves when the mind is able to focus all its energy on one target and keep it there. Letting your mind wander between multiple things can reduce productivity. And that is exactly what meetings do to you.
There are only few of us who can boast of having spent a productive day. And these are the people who turn out to be successful eventually. What is it that makes some people more productive than others? Small tweaks to how quickly you fire off emails, take breaks, and ask questions and more importantly shorter meetings can make all the difference in how happy, productive, and effective you are at work.
Warren Buffet once said, "The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say 'no' to almost everything." Which also includes unnecessary meetings. Other things highly productive people do would include defining goals the night before, responding to e-mails as they arrive, focussing on one thing at a time.
Productive people don't allow their meetings to be a constant interruption. They say no meetings that do not demand their presence. Prolonged meetings often lead to procrastination of other tasks. When you overloaded with presentations, you feel too fatigued to focus on the most important task. Successful people do not take chances, they take action and get the tough assignments done first, instead of merely discussing about it.
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