Change your meeting default

Aim for short, and let people ask for more

If someone asks to meet with you, how much time do you block?

It’s pretty common to default to 60 minutes. But there’s no reason to assume that all meetings should take that long unless someone asks for less. You might be able to save some time by assuming meetings should be short — and then only scheduling longer if people ask for more.

In a perfect world, I think all meetings would be scheduled for the exact amount of time dictated by the agenda. If you’ve got 23 minutes of stuff to cover, then the meeting will be 23 minutes long. Unfortunately, electronic calendars make this pretty difficult, and there are enough advantages of electronic calendars that people tend to go along with their settings. Which means that meetings happen in intervals of 15 minutes, and almost universally in 30- or 60-minute chunks.

It might seem that setting the default at 60 minutes is wise. After all, if stuff takes less time, great. You now have open space in your schedule. Setting a 60-minute default will naturally limit how many meetings can get scheduled per day, and probably keep you from running behind in the way that a schedule packed with 30-minute meetings won’t.

But here’s the problem. People have a funny tendency to take the scheduled time as what they should aim for. I have been in many meetings in life that could have taken 5 minutes, but since we have the conference room for longer, well, does anybody have anything else to discuss? Or else the agenda isn’t as focused as it could be because people know they have more time.

If you set the default to 30 minutes, though, you change the dynamic. People can certainly ask for more. But they have to say why. They have to argue that there is enough material to justify changing the default. And that makes it mildly more likely that people will think through the agenda. Or they will do their best to cover the material in 30 minutes. And if it can be covered in 30 — awesome! You just made the meeting 50 percent more efficient right there.

I have argued elsewhere to set the default at 20-25 minutes or 40-50 minutes — both of which have some benefits over 30 and 60 minutes. They’re shorter. They’re reachable from the norm but force a bit of the trim.

But since I know most organizations with electronic calendars will not do this, consider this Vanderhack to be your nudge to default to 30 instead of 60. You’ll still have plenty of hour long meetings. But probably less of them. And that’s generally a good thing.