4 step method to help you decide if you should call a meeting

It’s truly life-changing once we start to honor our time and stop wasting it on activities that serve us very little.

One of those activities are meetings. If you’re a coach who is on their way to level up, communication with your team is your daily necessity. However, there is a big difference between time well spend and time well wasted.

If you’re a micromanager who likes to know and be in control of everything that happens in your business, it’s time to switch a few things around. It’s great and necessary to be informed of major aspects, but not everything is important enough to require your presence and involvement at every level all the time.

If you’re a high achiever, you know that productive action matters when it comes to reaching your goals. So does effective communication. Unfortunately organizing and attending meetings is a big waste of your time. Especially when the task or issue could have been solved with a quick phone call or email.

Here are a few suggestions to keep you responsible for your time and help you decide whether the meeting is necessary or it’s just another way to steal your time away:

1. Are you clear on the situation? If the answer is “no”, then hold off the meeting. What you need to do instead is to create a plan. A strategic approach to a situation will save you time and help you get clear on agenda. This process will give you a clear idea of what to come and what to do about it. If the answer is “yes”, move on to the next question.
2. Do I need others’ input to make progress? If there is something blocking you from making a progress, then move to the next question. However, if you feel that can get on with the situation yourself, there is no need for a meeting. All you have to do at this point is dedicate time in your calendar to get going with the work.
3. Do you need to have a real-time conversation to make a progress? If you do need help from outside sources, establish whether you need that support in real-time. Maybe an email would work just fine?
4. Do you need to meet face-to-face to make progress? If so, you have reached that point when you need to organize that meeting. If it’s not the case and you know that message or a phone call would love your problem, go for it.

It might not always be easy to decide who to invite to a meeting. Especially when an important decision needs to be made. Inviting too many people, or people who cannot help you reach your goal can cause major ineffectiveness. To determine whether a specific person will serve the agenda of the meeting, ask yourself these 2 questions: Do I need input from this person? Will this person add value?

If you’re not an organizer but have been invited to a meeting, there are a couple of things you can do to save your time:

1. Ask for the agenda. If a meeting doesn’t have one, there is no need for it to happen in the first place. This is a great sign that your time in that meeting will not be spent on strategic goal achieving plan creation 🙂
2. Encourage collaboration. Trust that your team is strong enough to handle situations without your constant presence and involvement. Encouragement and trust will reward themselves and show up in your time freedom and more effective teamwork.
3. Ask for meeting notes. If you want to be informed of the situation, meeting notes is the best way to save yourself some time, but still, be in the loop of what happening.

I see a lot of time wasted why coaches who want to squeeze every precious minute out of the day. If that is the case for you start by doing a little inventory of where your time goes and how you could minimize unproductive activities creeping in. Join us at the Less is More program to create an effective communication system!

I would love to hear from you if you are a “meeting” person and how meeting impacts your time freedom?

Talk soon!

xx Agnese

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About Agnese

“LESS” & “SIMPLE” approach to life, business and mind for next level success