Ensuring that every meeting has a clearly defined purpose, and accomplishes that purpose, then ends.
We strongly advocate a Fairie to help you with this. Whether you use LessMeeting or not, you should be driving all of you meetings to a specific goal.
Issuing a follow up memo to everyone who attended the meeting, clearly delineating who came and what was decided.
We have heard from a lot of people we interviewed that they end up having the same discussions in meetings over and over again because decisions and action items are not tracked and followed up on. Be sure you spend the last few minutes of every meeting recapping your decisions, action items, owners, and time lines.
Scheduling meetings so that they don’t end when Outlook says they should, but so that they end when they need to.
If you are more focused about planning the objective and the agenda of your meeting, this point will come naturally. Also, getting in the practice of using a parking-lot to record important off subject topics will help you out with this.
Godin provide a few other great tips that your meeting Fairie should be helping you with. Check out the post at:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/01/making-meetings-more-expensive.html
