Schedule time for the next steps

Your meeting isn't done when it ends

From studying time logs, I know that many knowledge workers spend the bulk of their work days in meetings. It’s easy to go from meeting to meeting like middle schoolers changing classes. You go to your 2 o’clock, your 3 o’clock, and your 4 o’clock, without thinking through the implications and next steps from any of it.

This is problematic, because the point of a meeting is to make something happen in the world that could not have happened if people hadn’t come together. This means that, in most cases, participants will need to do something afterwards to make sure the meeting has achieved its purpose — even if that’s just sharing a decision with other stakeholders.

The only way to make sure this follow up happens is to schedule time for it. Otherwise, you won’t follow up in a timely fashion, or you might forget until the next meeting.

That 60-minute meeting is actually 75 minutes

There are two basic ways to do this.

One option is to schedule 15 minutes or so after each meeting as a follow-up block. You could adjust this based on the type of meeting, but the point is to build in some time. If you get to the end of the allocated time but haven’t finished all your follow-up tasks, then you can add the tasks you haven’t done yet to your to-do list for the day or the week.

I like this idea, because following up immediately afterwards means you’ve got momentum. You won’t forget what you agreed to do. Your to-do list won’t keep growing during the day. Plus, this rule means you can’t fill a whole day with meetings, so you’ll have to be more judicious about which meetings happen. That sounds like a good idea to me!

However, I know that a lot of people view a meeting as an hour and the next hour is fair game for something else. If there’s no way to avoid that, then you need to do something else to make sure you don’t forget or lose urgency. Probably the best way to solve this problem is to add things to your task list during the meeting itself. You still need to schedule another time later for follow up, but at least you won’t be in danger of forgetting as you race off to the next thing.

Tasks take time

But — I am serious here — that meeting follow-up time still needs to happen. Tasks take time. If there is no time allotted for them, then they won’t happen.

If you have more than one meeting every work day, then “meeting follow-up” should probably be a recurring task on each day’s to-do list. Schedule some time — an hour that you have open later in the day, or 45 minutes after the last meeting has ended — to go back through your meeting notes. Either do the tasks you have written down, or schedule time for any major tasks. You can review the notes as a whole and think through any additional follow-up activities that might be valuable.

Whichever approach you take, the point is to treat following up from a meeting as a distinct task from going to the meeting — because it is. Simply having attended the meeting probably doesn’t mean you are done with that meeting. There’s still something else to do.

If you’re leading meetings, you might help with this by ending them a bit early, so people automatically have 10-15 minutes for meeting follow-up built into their day. You could all sit right there and do any quick tasks. But even if you don’t do that, you want to make sure everyone is clear on their next steps. You can invite people to reflect back “what needs to happen between now and our next meeting” or something like that. Then, as attendees reflect on what they need to do, you can make sure their lists match yours. You can ask people to attach a time to their follow-up activities, so you can check in.

Yes, all this takes time. But if people are going to bother to meet, then things need to happen as a result of that meeting. It can feel like the best meeting in the world, but if people don’t follow up and do what was agreed on after, then it was a waste of time — so better to build the time in.