This article was taken from the April issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Chose work over meetings
It should always be worth meeting with colleagues to brainstorm, solve problems and rally the troops. But the sad truth is that most meetings are fruitless: vague agendas and monotonous updates consume time that would be better spent working. Indeed, my research into productivity has revealed that businesses are at their most efficient when they restrain the urge to meet.
One leader I met was Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music.
Holt only holds meetings where all participants stand the entire time. His reasoning? People get to the point when they've had enough of being on their feet.
Another best practice is to break the typical time allotments for meetings. To solve the problem of meetings starting and ending late, one team at a leading digital agency in New York City started scheduling meetings to begin and end on the 3s (ie 11.03am to 11.43am). These peculiar and specific times caused participants to be extra attentive and sensitive to time as it passed.
At my own company, we've started to measure the outcome of meetings by how many actionable items we leave with. Our thinking: if a meeting yields nothing actionable, it should never have been a meeting at all, but a telephone call or an email instead.
Scott Belsky is the CEO of Behance and author of the forthcoming book Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books, April 2010).
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
