The best time to hold meetings is... Amazon’s Jeff Bezos shares his rules for success
Bottom Line: Somewhere along the way there’s a joke about the best time for most meetings being never. For business professionals 15% of all work time is spent in meetings (higher if you’re in management) and according to Fuze 67% of all time in meetings is unproductive. Maybe some of it has to do with when the meetings are taking place.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recently told Axios his rules for meetings. The first one is when they take place. Before noon. He said he schedules all important meetings between 10 and noon. That’s enough time for him to get going and accomplish some of the top priorities of the day and to be mentally sharp going into the meetings. The next is how many people are allowed in meetings. He has a pizza rule.
Bezos won’t hold any meetings with more people than can be fed with two pizzas. He said they quickly become unproductive with too many people involved. Right about now you’re probably nodding. He also said something that ties in with my recent story about knowing when to say no. Here’s a quote from Jeff: “As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions, “Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. Is that really worth it if the quality of those decisions might be lower because you’re tired or grouchy?”
If you find that two-thirds of your time in meetings is unproductive when are they, and how many people are involved? Taking a slice from Bezos’s pie might be the answer to fixing them.