When accepting a meeting most of people look on meeting duration and their calendar. A meeting is 30 minutes and there is a spot of 30 minutes in calendar. This looks good at paper. But is it like this in reality?
I assume that you’re accepting a meeting not only because you’re invited. I assume that you have an interest in the meeting and you expect outcome influencing your further steps. If not, then I encourage you to review your approach to meetings and asses why you go to the meeting.
Now let’s see what influences how much a meeting really takes:
- Travel time (to and from meeting) for offline meetings. Even if it’s just a matter of going to conference room. Still it’s 5-10 minutes to and from the meeting. When it’s meeting in the town or another office then most of the time we plan a time to go to the meeting. But oftentimes we forget to plan a time to go back.
- With online meetings there is no travel time, but there is time needed to switch from your current task to the meeting. Don’t be fulled that you can just stop doing whatever you’re working on right when the meeting starts. So usually you need same 5-10 minutes which in offline meetings you spend to go to the conference room.
- One more thing that likely will happen with offline meeting is quick chit-chat after the meeting with a couple of people. I definitely don’t advocate for going straight back to your desk after the meeting. I just want you to take these extra minutes into account.
- Before the meeting you need to do some preparation. Even if this is not your meeting, you should review agenda, your reasons to be in the meeting, potentially summary from previous meeting, and any accompanying documents to put yourself into meeting context.
- Then there is summary and your next actions after the meeting. Even when you can rely on formal summary done by someone else, still you probably make your own notes of the items most important for you. Ideally you would summarize and add your next actions right after the meeting while you’re in its context.
As you can see what seems like half an hour meeting in reality can easily require twice as much time. Not to mention that poorly organized meeting can get longer by itself.
So whenever you accept a meeting double check if you have extra time before and after the meeting. And don’t forget to book that time as well.