Today, I’m going to tell you something that you already know you must do… but that the odds are high you haven’t yet done:

You need to reduce the amount of time you and your team spends in meetings.

Most meetings waste time, so I won’t waste your time explaining why. You already know this is true.

My suggestion is you adopt Zero-Based Meeting Scheduling.

Here’s how. Every 6-12 months, wipe all meetings off everyone’s calendar.

You read correctly. All meetings. Every single one.

Then, start scheduling them again with special care given to how you can keep meetings…

— Shorter
— Smaller
— More focused
— Less frequent
— More productive

Meetings get out of hand because people add them for good reasons, but then the meetings repeat again and again, long after those good reasons have dissipated. Plus, there’s no impetus (or clear authority) for someone to go in and reevaluate whether a meeting has grown so big, messy, unstructured or vague as to qualify as a true time-waster.

ZBMS fixes all these flaws, at least for a while. It’s a way to tame the beast and get some of your and your organization’s valuable time back.