Want Shorter Meetings? Trash the Chairs.

We all know that meetings are necessary … and at times significantly longer than necessary or productive.

Andy Kessler had a brilliant piece recently in the Wall Street Journal that offers that some excellent insights and suggestions for making meetings more productive and shorter. His ideas are too good not to share. Here are some.

• Apparently some executives at Twitter and Apple allow meetings only on Mondays. The rest of the week is meetings free. (I will bet that this results in a lot of issues that surface on Tuesdays and Wednesdays being resolved without meetings.)
• The president of BuzzFeed is a little looser. He dictates that meetings are prohibited on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• An innovative tech entrepreneur running a start up limits meetings to a single topic, does not allow any electronics (computers, projectors, PowerPoint), and limits them to ten minutes.
• Kessler reports that Amazon chief Jeff Bezos starts executive meetings with thirty minutes of silence while all read a “carefully crafted six-page report.” (I love the idea of the person who called the meeting being subjected to the discipline of presenting his or her ideas in writing.)
• Another creative executive has all meetings recorded on video with the videos available all in the organization indefinitely. (I think we would all be a bit more thoughtful and measured in our comments at a meeting if we knew all we said would be available to all indefinitely.)
• Finally, my favorite. One clever executive has had all the conference tables and chairs removed from the conference rooms. They have been replaced with bar-height tables but no chairs. (Does anyone question that meetings will be briefer when all have to stand?)

​Kessler gave us some wonderful ideas. I encourage you to try some to see what results you get.

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