Scheduling Lots of Meetings and Staying Sane
When you’re on a meeting marathon, such as job interviews, student office hours, or prospect meetings, things can get hectic. Here’s how to keep yourself sane.
Scheduling lots of meetings can be difficult. Recently I created a coaching program based on my TEDx talk called Living an Extraordinary Life. Part of an extraordinary life is getting what you want out of it, like J.P. Licks’s Oreo Ice Cream cake, instead of getting what you don’t want, like chitlins-flavored ice cream cake. I decided to interview everyone who was interested in the program, to make sure their needs would get met.
What a great chance to show off my awesome skill at running meetings! I’d always admired people who successfully held many meetings with many people. Professors schedule hundreds of students in their office hours; interviewers talk with dozens of job candidates; salespeople engage dozens of prospects. Now I was going to join the ranks of the marathon meeters.
I blocked off calendar time and let people schedule their own 1/2-hour meetings. In our meeting, we would get to know each other at the deepest level, bond forever, and decide whether the program was right for them.
Soon, the meetings filled up. So I blocked out more time. Eventually, I had 51 back-to-back half-hour appointments. This was gonna be great!
Sponsor: Netflix Instant Streaming. Watch thousands of TV episodes and movies on your PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Touch. Or on your TV through your XBox, PS3 or Wii. All streamed instantly by Netflix, saving you time, money and hassle. For a free 30-day trial, including all the episodes of The West Wing, go to Netflix qdt.
Don’t Forget – You’re Human
Day One: 16 appointments in 8 hours. I grabbed a 64-ounce sports bottle full of water (always take care of your voice when you plan to do a lot of talking), picked up the phone, and dove right in.
It was exciting! My prospect was excited, I was excited. The call went great. The next call was exciting too! And the next! The excitement was palpable, I could feel it…Wait…That feeling isn’t excitement, that’s having-to-go-to-the-bathroom after drinking 64 ounces of water in an hour. But the next call is coming in now. What to do? Well, thanks to Trainer Tyler, I’ve been a manly-man for years. I can hold it.
More meetings. I got more and more excited! Or maybe that was bladder pressure building. Relentlessly. Soon that was joined by another strange feeling. A hollowness. An emptiness. Existential angst? No…I’d forgotten to schedule time for lunch.
Fortunately the 1:30 appointment canceled. YAY! By 2 pm, I was empty, full, and happy, in that order.
Take Notes
Then the ninth person said something I was sure would help an earlier caller, the second person of the day. Or maybe it was the third? Or was it the fourth? When you have a lot of meetings in one day, taking organized, careful notes is essential. Unless your mind is far superior to mine (a possibility deemed impossible by the world’s top brain scientists), keeping everything sorted out in memory is really tough. But with such a busy schedule. I’d never given myself a chance to consolidate my thinking.
Fortunately, it’s easy to take killer notes, so I grabbed a notebook and the rest of the day’s calls were neatly logged and labeled in my almost totally legible handwriting.
Scheduling’s a Bummer
That night, after the 16th meeting, I opened my email. Why? Because I’m a masochist with no self control. Inside was a message from the person who had canceled the 1:30 time slot, wanting to reschedule. There was also a message from the Zombie Reanimation Powder supplier, wanting to discuss my overdue account. I stared at my calendar. The next week was booked solid. That poor prospect would have to reschedule for a week in the future. And my supplier? No room for that call until the month after next.
The extra sneaky part is the great scheduling flexibility.
Something had to change. The day had been a logistical nightmare. Being popular should not be so much work. I saw the movie Heathers, back in the day. Heather didn’t have a problem scheduling once during the entire movie. Neither did Heather #2, or Heather #3. What was I missing? I stared at my calendar intently, neatly marked off in 1/2-hour blocks. Suddenly it came to me! What a sucker I’d been, what a fool. The answer was there all along. It took a small accident to make it happen. An accident.
Schedule Half Hour Gaps
The answer is simple. Trivial, even. Alternate 1/2-hour meetings with 1/2-hour gaps in my schedule. In one fell swoop, that solves all my problems. It gives ample time between each meeting for breaks. Now there’s time to drink, a time to undrink, a time to eat, a time to take extra notes and organize them. Even a time to do cardio and abs.
But wait, there’s more! Gaps give you a chance to respond to emergencies and do tiny tasks to let your brain recharge and recover. Plus more gaps means you’ll schedule fewer meetings per day, so you won’t be overwhelmed. It will take more days to get through the same number of meetings, but that’s fine. Trust me, you’d rather be conscious and semi-coherent for the meetings or they’re a waste of time anyway.
“Why can’t I leave just 5 minutes between meetings?” you ask. The answer is extra-sneaky. By scheduling 30-minute meetings, you encourage people to be on time and efficient. But leaving the larger gap, gives you the option of extending the meeting if needed (and everyone agrees, of course). All the benefits of efficiency plus the benefits of inefficiency.
The extra, extra sneaky part is that half-hour gaps between 30-minute meetings give you great scheduling flexibility. You tell people about the meetings that start on the hour. You leave the half-past-the-hour slots open. If one or more people need to reschedule, you have many places to reschedule them on the same day or nearby days.
When you’re scheduling meetings out the wazoo, alternate between scheduled meetings and unscheduled time. Use the unscheduled time to take care of yourself and your body, organize your notes, allow meetings to end a bit late if needed, deal with unexpected interruptions, and provide flexibility when rescheduling is needed.
For more on how to manage meetings and create systems to make your life function better, check out Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.
You May Also Like…
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
