We spend hours in meetings.
And why do we spend hours in them?
Well, one reason is because the default duration on our computers is often one hour!
So, to make them shorter therefore…
… shorten the default duration
Imagine if every meeting was automatically scheduled for, say, 20 minutes – you’d quickly get used to that being the norm.
And your time savings would be huge. If your meetings usually last 60 minutes, but now last 20 – you’ve reduced your meeting time by two-thirds. That’s tens-of-hours per week saved. Hundreds-of-hours per year.
And on the rare occasions that a meeting absolutely must last one hour, you could manually change the duration back to an hour.
Here’s how you change the default duration in Outlook (if you use a different system, search its “help” function to find your equivalent):
- File
- Options
- Calendar
- Default duration for new appointments and meetings (set it to the lowest – 30 minutes)
- Shorten appointments and meetings (set it to “end early”)
- Less than one hour (set it to “10 minutes”)
- OK
And that’s it.
From now on, for all your meetings, your calendar will assume it’ll last 20 minutes.
Time. Saved.
(Obviously, if 20 minutes feels too short for you, change your new default to something a bit longer. But I promise you that – once you start shortening your meetings…you’ll keep on wanting to shorten them more!)
Action Point
Change your default duration.
And then start to think about what to do with all this extra time you now have!