Imagine being in an online meeting that has dragged on for more than an hour and there is no end in sight. There you are daydreaming of better ways to rearrange the furniture in your house rather than focusing on the current discussion. Most online meetings are like that now. Especially with the well documented extended online meeting times since everyone is working remotely. Some managers even believe that longer meetings are better and more productive.

However, longer meetings do not mean it is better. It may seem that you are covering a lot of topics, however it is usually the same merry go round of repeated talking points. This will then lead to an inevitable second meeting, followed by subsequent meetings and there you have it. We are now in the vicious meeting cycle of endless discussions. This is primarily due to a lack of focus and sense of responsibility by all members to help facilitate the meeting.

There is a solution to this quandary. To prevent this from happening, there is a magic technique available. This technique is already commonly used in multiple major organizations such as  Intel, Google and Microsoft.

It is called time-boxing.

Time-boxing is a Scrum principle that treats time as a limiting constraint when conducting meetings. This means meetings and project sprints have a maximum timeframe that cannot be exceeded.

For example, Daily Stand Up Meetings are 15 minutes or less. This limitation forces people to focus on the results. Distractions and protracted discussions that do not add value will be minimized, as time is treated as a finite valuable resource. All team members are focused on the important tasks or activities and prevent doing unnecessary tasks.

In conclusion, time-boxing helps to create an environment that allows team members to focus on the project. Once the team is focused, all activities like meetings and deadlines will not drag on forever. This then allows team members to have more time to come up with creative ideas. It even reduces instances of daydreaming during meetings!

To learn more about how you can time-boxing and other Agile Management techniques, click here.

By,

Udhay Sharma,

Scrum Master and Scrum enthusiast since 2017