Meetings timer

How to use the online timer

Half an hour is the default length most calendars offer, and defaults are worth questioning: a great many thirty-minute meetings are fifteen-minute meetings with fifteen minutes of preamble attached. Work has a habit of expanding to fill whatever slot it has been given, so booking twenty-five minutes instead of thirty produces a tighter conversation and a gap before the next thing, which the back-to-back day badly needs.

Two things decide whether the half hour is useful, and neither happens during it. The first is a stated purpose beyond a subject line, so that everyone knows what a successful meeting would look like. The second is the guest list, since every additional attendee lengthens the discussion and lowers the chance of anyone deciding anything. A meeting with no decision to make and no information to share is usually a message.

Timing the meeting itself keeps the shape honest, particularly in the last third when the conversation tends to drift into whatever is most interesting rather than most important. Leaving five minutes at the end for who is doing what by when is the part most often skipped, and it is the part that decides whether the previous twenty-five were worth anybody's morning.