Click HERE for the full Inc. Magainze post.
Keep the invite list small — ideally, three to five people.
His reasoning? The more people you have in a meeting, the less productive it is. Too many voices become a sea of noise and it’s less likely you’ll get anything accomplished. In fact, Jobs famously declined an invite from President Obama to a tech meeting because, well, the guest list was too long.
Also, as you craft your invite list, know exactly what each person’s stake or role in the meeting will be. If they cannot or will not contribute, cut them. Anyone there for informational purposes can be sent a transcript or recording after the fact.
Keep the agenda short — no more than three items.
The goal here is focus. With more than three items on an agenda, you’re likely to get lost in a rabbit hole of unrelated topics and side conversations. It’s hard to know what conclusions to draw and what action items you have at the end when agenda items run amuck. Keep it short — and make sure all three agenda items are clearly connected to the core meeting purpose.
Keep the length to no more than 30 minutes.
You may think the substance of a given meeting demands a bigger time slot, but science tells us that largely ends up as a waste of time. Our attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s and our mental stamina is unable to sustain meaningful, analytical discussion for very long. If you keep meetings short (no more than 30 minutes) and parcel key pieces of information in digestible chunks (one- to two-minute segments), you’re more likely to leave the meeting with broad comprehension.
Sheryl Sandberg took this a step further, actually — she kept a lot of her meetings to 10 minutes.