The 3 golden rules of Steve Jobs so that work meetings are really effective
Work meetings can be a good way to kick off a project or generate creative ideas. However, they are often not done effectively and can waste a lot of time and money .
There's no shortage of ideas on how to make meetings more productive, from holding meetings while walking outside to writing down ideas instead of speaking out loud.
In this regard, there are a few key points that experts tend to agree on. A Business Insider report highlights that Steve Jobs , co-founder of Apple, was one of those who sought to make his meetings more efficient and who explained the three simple rules he used to do so.
1) Other successful leaders also say limit attendees
Meetings often end up being unproductive when too many people are present. More people means more chance of interruptions, more noise and therefore misunderstandings.
Jobs openly told White House officials that he did not plan to go to a meeting with Barack Obama because the guest list had become too long, The Huffington Post reported.
Jeff Bezos , founder of Amazon, also believes that meetings are less productive when too many people attend. He uses his “two pizza rule” to judge this. The idea is that you shouldn't have a meeting if two pizzas aren't enough to feed everyone.
Elon Musk , CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, actually encourages people to leave meetings if they're not contributing something meaningful to them. “It's not rude to leave. It's rude to make someone stay and waste their time,” he said.
2) Short agenda: no more than three points
To help people stay focused, meetings should have no more than three agenda items , otherwise it's easy to lose focus and end up discussing things that aren't related to the most important meeting points. It is also extremely difficult for humans to remember large amounts of information in a single sitting.
To test this, two British psychologists, J. Blackburn and EJ Lindgren, recorded a discussion at the end of a meeting of the Cambridge Psychological Society. Two weeks later, they asked attendees to write down what they remembered from the meeting.
The average number of items recalled by each person was only 8.4% of what was actually recorded . 42% of recalled items were recalled incorrectly. Many of the things they remembered were never said or were said at another time .
It is extremely important to have a clear and concise agenda distributed to everyone who will attend the meeting so that each individual can prepare to contribute something and avoid getting sidetracked.
“Give me an agenda or I'm not going to sit there, because if I don't know why we're in the meeting, then there's no reason for a meeting,” Annette Catino , executive director of the QualCare Alliance Network, told The New York Times.
3) Short meetings: no more than 30 minutes
Jobs also believed that meetings are often more effective when they are short . Our attention span and mental stamina tend to suffer when meetings go on for a long time.
Business magazine Fast Company reported that Sheryl Sandberg , Meta's chief operating officer, has been known to sometimes end meetings that were scheduled to last an hour in 10 minutes if she feels everything is done.
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