Time Management - Marc Mancini

Learning to Say No 87
vide you with a written agenda in advance.
2. Assign the meeting a clear start time. Check for conference
room availability. Equally important: the meeting shouldn’t be
delayed for late arrivals. Participants will soon learn that you
expect them to be prompt. (Of course, leave room for exceptional
circumstances or essential people.)
3. Assign an official closing time to the meeting. Open-ended
meetings can drag on, with participants mired in trivial or ancillary
concerns. A tight finish time disciplines participants to work
more efficiently and with fewer tangents. Shorter meetings tend
to concentrate discussions on the real goals of the meeting and
keep it focused. If the meeting length must expand, it should be
by the consensus of all the participants. And if the meeting was
scheduled by someone else, ask that he or she set a finish time.
4. Set at least one goal for your meeting. A meeting without
clear objectives is rudderless. A committee meeting should
have a “para-goal.” Concentrate on how the meeting should
achieve the component objectives of that goal.
5. Be reasonable about the number of topics to be covered.
Having established a start time, a finish time, and a set of goals,
you should be able to designate a reasonable number of subjects
for discussion. An agenda too tight with topics is doomed
from the start. If you must cover a sizable number of themes,
consider the following:
• Establish a later finish time.
• Postpone less important priorities to the next meeting.
• Divide your meeting into simultaneous or separate submeetings
that deal with fewer topics.
• Create a separate meeting during which the whole group
will tackle what cannot be covered in the time allotted.
6. Invite only the necessary people. People who plan meetings
often feel they should invite everyone even remotely interested
in what’s going on. This is a serious mistake. The time it takes
to get things done in a meeting expands geometrically with the