Speaker 1: Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the New Corner Office,
Speaker 1: the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the
Speaker 1: new world of work, where location and hours are more
Speaker 1: flexible than in the past. Today's tip is to change
Speaker 1: your meeting default time. A surprising number of people automatically
Speaker 1: schedule meetings for sixty minutes. By changing this at least
Speaker 1: two thirty minutes, you force people to justify any lengthier requests. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: this can save a ton of time. In a perfect world,
Speaker 1: I think all meetings would be scheduled for the exact
Speaker 1: amount of time dictated by the agenda. If you've got
Speaker 1: twenty three minutes of stuff to cover, then the meeting
Speaker 1: will be twenty three minutes long. Unfortunately, electronic calendars make
Speaker 1: this pretty difficult, and there are enough advantages of electronic
Speaker 1: calendars that people tend to go along with their settings,
Speaker 1: which means that meetings happen in intervals of fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: and almost universally in thirty or sixty minute chunks. Now,
Speaker 1: it might seem that setting the default to sixty minutes
Speaker 1: is wise, after all of stuff takes less time. Great,
Speaker 1: you now have open space in your schedule. Setting a
Speaker 1: sixty minute default will naturally limit how many meetings can
Speaker 1: get scheduled per day and probably keep you from running
Speaker 1: behind in a way that a schedule packed with thirty
Speaker 1: minute meetings just won't. But here's the problem. People have
Speaker 1: a funny tendency to take the scheduled time as what
Speaker 1: they should aim for. I have been in a great
Speaker 1: many meetings in life that could have taken five minutes.
Speaker 1: But since someone booked the conference room for an hour, well,
Speaker 1: does anybody have anything else to discuss? How about we
Speaker 1: go off on a tangent on office fridge policies. The
Speaker 1: meeting could end, but it seems weird to end someone's
Speaker 1: sixty minute meeting at five minutes in, and so people
Speaker 1: don't or they don't focus because hey, they've got sixty minutes.
Speaker 1: If you set the default to thirty minutes, though, or
Speaker 1: if you're brave fifteen, you change the dynamic. People can
Speaker 1: certainly ask for more. And if you set the default
Speaker 1: at fifteen minutes, trust me, most people will ask for more,
Speaker 1: but they'll have to say why. They'll have to argue
Speaker 1: that there is enough material to justify changing your default,
Speaker 1: and that makes it mildly more likely that people will
Speaker 1: think through the agenda or they will do their best
Speaker 1: to cover the material in thirty minutes instead of sixty minutes.
Speaker 1: And if it can be covered in thirty minutes, well awesome,
Speaker 1: you've just made the meeting fifty more efficient, right there.
Speaker 1: I have argued in past episodes of my various podcasts
Speaker 1: that people should set the default at twenty minutes or
Speaker 1: forty minutes, both of which have some real benefits over
Speaker 1: thirty years. Sixty minutes most obviously, they're shorter, they're reachable
Speaker 1: from the norm, but force a bit of a trim.
Speaker 1: But since I know most organizations with electronic calendars won't
Speaker 1: do this, consider this episode to be your nudge to
Speaker 1: default to thirty minutes instead of sixty minutes. You'll still
Speaker 1: have plenty of hour long meetings, trust me, you will,
Speaker 1: but probably a few less of them, and that's generally
Speaker 1: a good thing. In the meantime, This is Laura, Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening, and here's to succeeding in the New Corner Office.
Speaker 1: The New Corner Office is a production of I Heart Radio.
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