Getting the most out of your time

My Best Advice: Getting the most out of your time

As someone who can have as many as 14 meetings during the course of just one working day I have always had to be extremely careful about how I manage the process and my time.

During the course of a normal working week I would expect to have between 65 and 75 meetings and I always do my best to ensure that they are always productive and result in some positive action being taken by those involved.

The key to achieving that goal is through a mixture of forward planning and preparation along with professional discipline during the course of the meeting.

Typically I would expect most meetings to last between 30 minutes and an hour. You need to leave yourself enough time to cover all the necessary business on the agenda. However, I tend to find that if a meeting goes on for too long then you can lose focus and that is why it is always important to be disciplined.

All businesses rely on good communication to thrive and the meeting is a key part of this process - therefore it is important that the system works as efficiently and effectively as possible. At least 48 hours before any meeting I will ask my personal assistant to get in touch with everyone involved and ask them for their thoughts and suggestions for the agenda. It's better to have all the right paperwork involved prior to the meeting.

As well as making people think ahead it also makes those taking part focus on the purpose of the meeting. There is no point in holding a meeting for the sake of it, there should always be a clear thought out process.

I would never go into an important meeting without an assistant or someone to capture the important points that may need to be actioned. If you are discussing an important strategy or development for your company then it is vital that you are free to focus on the job in hand. The chairman or woman's main objective is to keep everyone on track so ensure there are printed copies of the agenda and important information to hand, or better still put them on a large screen for everyone to follow.

A big mistake many people make at the end of a meeting is that they don't leave a section on the agenda to recap on everyone's actions. Many people go away knowing that there are actions to do but not necessarily what they are. I would encourage going round the room and hearing the actions that everyone is taking away with them.

Once the meeting has come to a conclusion it is also important that everyone who has taken part understands what conclusions were reached particularly if it involves them.