There are various views of how long a good meeting should be.  Some people argue that anything longer than two hours indicates an unproductive meeting.  On the other hand some people may have to travel a long distance for a meeting and feel that to justify the journey the meeting needs to be longer than two hours.

The golden rule is to set a timeframe for the meeting and try to keep to it as much as possible.  It is worth assigning an alloted time to each agenda item to ensure that everything gets discussed.

The timeframe should not be so rigid as to constrain conversation and if an agenda item is taking more than the allocated slot you should work with the group to determine:

• if they are happy to either extend the time of the meeting; or
• drop a later agenda item for discussion at a future meeting; or
• if they feel the conversation needs to be brought to a close and there is a need to move on to the next item on the agenda anyway.

Participants will thank you for keeping track of time but try to do this in a collaborative way so that they don't feel like the timing of the meeting has become more important than the content of the meeting!

Downloads:

Managing Meetings.pdf

A guide to managing meetings.

Planning a Great Meeting.pdf

How to plan for a good meeting.