Comstock's magazine 0919 - September 2019 | Page 57

odds that the optimal time to accomplish your
goal is exactly 30 or 60 minutes? Recall the wis-
dom from Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill
however much time you give it. So why give it the
full hour?
Montanaro suggests meeting for a fractional
time, like 23 minutes. “People aren’t as late if you
have a start time of 4:07,” she says. That time is
memorable, even kind of playful, and, worst case,
it will only waste 23 minutes instead of 30. If that’s
simply too goofy for your organization’s culture,
you can go the Google Calendar route, and default
all meetings to 20 or 50 minutes instead of 30 and
60, which builds in a cushion for bathroom and
email breaks. In his book “The Surprising Science
of Meetings,” Steven G. Rogelberg cites the ex-
ample of TINYpulse, a survey research company,
which “starts a daily staff meeting at 8:48 a.m. Not
only does this practice raise eyebrows because of
its uniqueness, but also, as an added bonus, TINY-
pulse reports almost zero tardiness.”
The Where
Another simple tweak is to mix up the location. When
Montanaro conducts training sessions at a law firm,
she’ll sometimes surprise them by saying, “Let’s go
outside!” Or maybe she’ll make it a walking meeting,
a la every Aaron Sorkin show. “I personally love walk-
ing meetings,” she says. “If you get people to move
their bodies, it gets the oxygen flowing, changes per-
spectives.” Walking meetings, typically one on one,
are fashionable in Silicon Valley; Rogelberg says the
ranks of meeting-walkers include Twitter’s Jack Dor-
sey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and employees at
LinkedIn, where “folks circle around a 22- to 25-min-
ute looped path in their corporate headquarters.”
Then there’s the huddle, aka the daily stand-
up or daily scrum, which has “really taken off,”
September 2019 | comstocksmag.com
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