It’s pretty hard to imagine, but I can teach you how to spend more time in meetings, less time at work and get more accomplished in any given day. Want to learn how?

How could you possibly spend one more minute in meetings and get more accomplished in your work? Here’s how meetings allow you to accomplish more in less time.

1. Set Rhythm – The faster you are meeting, reviewing results and solving problems the faster your firm can grow. The book “Competing on Internet Time” chronicles the browser battle between Netscape and Microsoft. To sustain its amazing rate of growth, Netscape treated each month as if it were a year – taking its executives offsite each and every month to hold a formal strategic meeting.
   I’m not suggesting you meet offsite once per month, but a well-planned and orchestrated meeting will drive performance. The more often you have great meetings the more often you get that great “preparation fuel” that will drive your people to give just a little more.
   
   
2. Less Interruptions – A regular meeting habit gives everyone the opportunity to solve problems at that meeting, not by lining up at your door, emailing, calling or texting you. This gives leadership the “clear thinking” time they must have to do their best work. Don’t let an open door policy kill your productivity. Answer questions when it is time to answer questions, work when you need to work!
   
   
3. Less Excuses – One on one meetings are great, except they take up a ton more time and allow your team to feed you excuses that they would never try in a group environment. Leverage the power of team accountability. Excuses will diminish and more work will get done.
   
   
4. Focus – It happens to all of us. Even the best intentioned and folks like myself who would love to consider themselves “strategic” in their thinking. We are easily distracted. Hard projects get put off in favor of less painful and more interesting work. Face it. Your organization has its “frogs” that it must eat every morning to be successful. Team meetings keep us focused on the most important (and sometimes most difficult) work that must be done for the organization to reach its goals.
   
   
5. Mastermind Power – Ever heard of a mastermind? Its worthy of its own post, but to keep it simple a mastermind is a group of like-minded people working together to push each other to accomplish their goals.  The great thinkers and doers of all time surrounded themselves with a group like this. It is powerful, for many of the same reasons meetings are powerful. Why not use the power of a mastermind through your daily and weekly meeting structure?

Getting more of the right things accomplished in less time. Getting home to see your family, go to church, exercise or whatever it is that you don’t currently have time to do. Wouldn’t that be great? Stay with us. We’ll dive in to how to set up and run your meetings in next week’s blog.

About Curt Fowler

Curt Fowler is the President and Founder of Fowler & Company, a business advisory firm founded to help its clients maximize the value of their organizations. Curt is a Certified Public Accountant and earned his Masters in Accountancy from the University of Georgia. He also earned an MBA in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from the Kellogg School at Northwestern. He has spent 20 years studying and learning from some of the best businesses in America including Verizon, Sara Lee, Cox Communications and many more.