If you’ve been running meetings for years, your habits might be working against you. Ponder the five points directly below. If any of these describe your meetings, there’s room for improvement.

• No agenda – or a sketchy agenda at best
• Passive participants who seldom lean in and contribute
• Frequent no-shows
• Insufficient prep work (and occasional last-minute rushing) before the meeting starts
• Having to repeat – because the previous meeting wasn’t productive

The assessment part is easy. The tough part involves acknowledging the need to do things differently, breaking our patterns, establishing new practices, and sticking with them to achieve real gains. This meeting toolkit gives you all the ideas you need.

To go with your snap qualitative reality check (above), add up the impact in terms of time. The Meeting Time Calculator will give you  key numbers, and some of these might surprise you. Want to know how much time you can save and redirect each year with fewer meetings and better meetings? The calculator will tell you.

Have a constructive conversation with colleagues on how your meetings can be reduced and improved. Make this a meaningful effort where you look at what’s going well, what’s not going well, and what can be done differently going forward to making meetings more useful and productive. One or two practical changes can make a difference – and you’ll find many ideas in this toolkit. Try it.

Make meeting agendas a standard for your area, department, division, or college/school. Set an expectation that all meetings will have agendas, that the agendas will state a clear purpose and expected outcomes, and that supporting materials (when applicable) will be sent to participants in advance. Creating a simple agenda is your surest way to set up a meeting for success.

The purpose of your meeting should drive who to include in the meeting. Be intentional with who you invite, making sure that everyone brings something of value to the table. Otherwise, the session will be slowed down and potentially detoured by well-intended people who have things to say that don’t relate to the agenda at hand – or it will be dragged down by passive bystanders who fill up the real or virtual room but have nothing to say.

It makes sense for a work group to have regular meetings in order to stay informed and connected, but these standing meetings can degrade over time – to the point where there’s no clear purpose, conversation ranges all over the place, and the time they take adds up in a major way. Don’t ditch these entirely, but consider sharpening the focus (agenda!), reducing the frequency, potentially reducing the meeting time, and making thoughtful use of asynchronous communication tools (Teams, shared documents, and messaging platforms) to keep everyone in the loop and communicating.

Many meetings are scheduled to end on the hour or half hour, because our calendars have 30- and 60-minute blocks as default settings. Most of us don’t think about it, but for people who have back to back meetings, the result is often one long and tiring stretch of interactions. The 20/50 rule proposes a simple alternative: schedule meetings to last 20 minutes or 50 minutes. This gives people a a crucial 10-minute cushion to decompress and recharge (after one meeting) and prep for the next.

When meetings are scattered throughout the week, workdays are randomly sliced and diced into different activities – and people end up jumping from one thing to the next, with little uninterrupted time for work that calls for sustained attention. This is unavoidable to a degree, because the timing of certain meetings isn’t always in our control. But with an office or larger area, people can do something about it. Get together as a team, discuss the situation, determine what would work best for everyone, and agree together on specific times and/or days when meetings are not to be scheduled. See how it goes for a month, then refine the approach.