When considering things we can’t avoid in life, meetings rub shoulders with the likes of death and taxes. Much like the other two, they generally have a greater influence on our lives the older we get…and boy are they irksome. We’ve all opened the calendar and been absolutely livid that, not only has someone shoe-horned a meeting into the diary when we weren’t looking, but it clearly overlaps with a meeting that was there already.
WHO DOES THAT?!?!?
Today we take a fresh look at meetings and how, with some minor changes, they can form part of a really effective exercise plan. I’ll start this with a statement of fact:
Your Meeting Does Not Have To Be An Hour Long
One hour is one 24th of the time it takes for the Earth to rotate once. One hour has a lot of significance. What one hour does not have, is any connection whatsoever to how long it should take Steve to talk about the new process of uploading expenses. YET!...when Steve is told he has to present to different teams on the new process of uploading expenses…
…it’s gonna take an hour.
With absolutely no thought or understanding of what he needs to say, to who, using what tools or teams for support – there’s only going to be one answer. That’s right. A plump, full-bodied hour is going in the diary, immediately robbing you of 60 minutes.
Here are the shocking numbers linked to meetings attended by professionals (largely down to people like Steve):
Volume – 5 per day, 25 meetings a week
Duration – 51 minutes long
Total – 21.5 hours in meetings a week, over half of the “standard 40-hour workweek”
The impact of meetings being either 30 minutes or 60 minutes is that you can get from 9am to 1pm without a single bit of blue sky in your diary. Sometimes you may not even have the opportunity to go to the toilet for hours at a time…unless you’re careful with the mute button and your Bluetooth headset gets that far.
That said, how can you possibly achieve anything that remotely resembles exercise during the working day? The answer is not only easy to implement but insanely powerful, yet almost no one does it:
Reduce your meeting time, make your meetings better, use the time you’ve created wisely.
Step 1: Reduce your meeting time
If you are scheduling a meeting and you always make it 30 minutes or 60 minutes – you are reinforcing the ‘old culture’ that we don’t need to be pinned down by anymore.
If you honestly believe that what you thought needed 30 minutes to say could not feasibly be said in 25, or what’s possible in 60 minutes isn’t possible in 50…to be frank you probably shouldn’t be leading meetings.
Reduce. Your. Meeting. Time.
Step 2: Make your meetings better
If you think your meeting must take the full 30 or 60 minutes, here are some quick and easy tips to improve the efficiency of your meetings and prove your current-self wrong.
Set an agenda – If you don’t make it clear exactly what will be discussed in that meeting, new topics will be introduced or important things will be forgotten about until it’s too late. Both make meetings longer than they should be. The agenda should include things like checking in with each other and finding out how everyone is. That’s a crucial part of meetings, but all too often people don’t account for it, and it derails the whole thing.
Time box that agenda – Assign each agenda item an allotted time. If it’s not your item, ask the person who’s presenting it how long it’ll take them. Adding these up tells you how long the meeting needs to be.
Stick to those time boxes – Keep the agenda ticking over at the pace it was agreed. If something isn’t resolved by the end of its timebox and doesn’t require the input of the whole audience, hit the office lingo-bingo-jackpot and ask them to ‘take it offline’. If the topic is crucial, remove a later item off the agenda but make sure it is resolved outside of the meeting.
Have predefined roles – One person leads the meeting. One person tracks the agenda against the time and notifies the Lead when it’s time to move on. One person logs the actions/key decisions. Swap these roles meeting-to-meeting to keep everyone engaged.
These simple tools will ensure you cover everything you need to while simultaneously cutting down your meeting times.
On top of this, because anything out of the ordinary piques people’s interest, people will notice. When they see 25- or 50-minute meetings going in, they might even comment. You can explain what you did and why, and they may start doing the same, giving lots of other people valuable time back.
Not all heroes wear capes.
[Level of excitement not guaranteed]
Have you ever moaned about not having enough time between meetings and then scheduled one to finish on the hour?
Stop doing that.
Step 3: Use the time you’ve created wisely
Improving the efficiency of your meetings can cut their duration…what can this mean for your health? If you control the scheduling or work closely with whoever does (this probably covers 90% of meetings), you have influence that can shave 5-10 minutes off up to 25 meetings per week.
That’s 25 opportunities to fit in exercise that weren’t there before.
Importantly, these opportunities are very easy to spot, they’re the small, awkward-looking windows of time in your diary that were never there before.
Now make a non-negotiable commitment to yourself that says “every time I see a meeting end after 25 minutes, I’m going to do X, and every time I see a meeting end after 50 minutes, I’m going to do Y.”
Once you’ve made that commitment, watch how you react. You really shouldn’t ignore a blatant prompt from your calendar to do something solely for you.
Yes, for the sake of this blog I suggest you exercise…but at the very least take the time to breath, meditate, message a friend/family member, stretch or drink some water!
Conclusion:
So, you’ve smashed that meeting and have 10 minutes in the dairy you weren’t expecting…what can you really fit into that window?
Do whatever you can and do it consistently. If it’s 10 lunges, it’s 10 lunges you weren’t going to do otherwise – but make sure it’s 10 lunges every time. Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in, day out. Getting your heart rate up 5 more times than you would’ve done every day is so good for your body.
But for a specific example:
In 10 minutes, you can do 100 air squats (burning 32 calories), grab yourself a cup of tea (put the kettle on before the squats!), go for a wee and be back at your desk with time to prep for the next call.
Scale that up to the 5 meetings a day that could finish early and you’re burning 160 calories per day…800 calories per week.
Within 22.5 days you’ve burnt the equivalent of a pound of body fat (3600 calories) by doing nothing more than leading a better meeting.
If you choose to cut meeting times and use that time effectively for yourself, you could burn the equivalent of a pound of body fat every 22.5 working days in calories.
...What's stopping you trying this next time you schedule a meeting?
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