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Dear Friends, – Janet
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Reason #7: A timer helps me manage meetings
Have you ever been in a meeting with a group of people where…
- the meeting ran unnecessarily long?
- the group spent too much time talking about one thing when you really should have been talking about something of more significance?
- someone in the group loved to hear themselves talk and apparently thought you loved to hear them talk as well?
Of course you have! We all have. Thinking back to my time on a non-profit board, we had all that going on and more. It was not uncommon for a scheduled two-hour meeting to last over three hours! Shortly after becoming chair of the board and the person in charge of the meetings, I knew I had to find a better way. 😉 I realized that it wasn’t enough to expect that a two-hour meeting would actually end in two-hours. No, we needed help managing the time in-between. So…
First, as the meeting organizer, it was all about my preparation. My agendas started including how much time was allocated for each topic on the agenda. For example, if we had 5 topics on the agenda, the 1st one might get 15 minutes, the 2nd might get 25 minutes, and so on. Each topic was allocated the time I thought it would take to discuss and make decisions, if needed. This extra time spent in preparation also helped me decide what our biggest priorities for the meeting were. If I had more topics to discuss then minutes available, I had to re-prioritize, re-allocate, save some for later, or handle them a different way.
Second, as the meeting facilitator, when we started each topic, I set a timer for the allocated amount – making it visible to all. Because we used a visual timer (the Time Timer ®), everyone could easily see how much time we had left for that particular topic, and I didn’t have to be the bad guy trying to end a conversation or keep us focused. Almost everyone self-regulated but even if on occasion someone didn’t, it was less awkward to redirect thanks to the timer and group accountability.
As a result, we did a better job staying on topic and thoughts were still thoroughly shared, just more concisely. Though I spent more time preparing the agenda and thinking about how much time we needed per topic, we got that time back in spades when we were out the door in two-hours!
One of my favorite timers (right) is from Time Timer, a company in Cincinnati. In future newsletters, I’ll be sharing more about how helpful this timer can be in the workplace. If you’d like to pick one up, you can find it, along with some of my other favorite resources, on our Products page.
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