The Snowball Effect: Communication Techniques to Make You Unstoppable

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When you want to ensure meetings generate actions, not just discussion topics

Some meetings are little more than glorified chats. Lots discussed, but not one action arising. These are a drain on your time – especially if they happen every week. Team updates, anyone?

To resolve this, you can:

• Keep the content the same, or change it; and/or
• Keep the duration the same, shorten it, or just stop having the meeting.

In my experience, the worst option is usually to keep both content and duration the same. After all:

• If you waste an hour every week at meetings like this, stopping them would save you one week per year (to remind yourself how I worked this out, please see this section’s introduction).
• Therefore, if these meetings involve say 26 people, stopping ...