Meetings are a boring, but necessary evil.

A recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That's over 200 hours a year. For a grand total over an entire career of–are you sitting down?–9,000 hours of meetings. That's a solid year and 10 days of your precious time.

here are few tried and true strategies for running productive meetings: Be prepared, have a leader, an agenda, a fixed time to start and stop, a conclusion and plan to follow up. But if we have to sit around in a windowless conference room for 9,000 hours, can't we come up with something more . . . engaging?

Here are 10 strategies to get your office meeting off life support. Plus a bonus tip on meetings from Mark Zuckerberg:

1. Pretend you've already failed.

Guy Kawasaki, a business guru and best-selling author, advises business leaders to gather their team before making critical decisions such as launching a product or service. He suggests seizing these moments to say, “Let us pretend that our product, our company failed. Now, what are all the possible reasons?” The reasons may include lack of distribution, an unsophisticated sales force, buggy software, or unreliable cloud services. According to Kawasaki, the point is to get people imagining everything that could go wrong, so they can take steps to remedy problems before they happen. In other words, he says, “Conduct a pre-mortem so that you never have to conduct a post-mortem.”

2. Keep it Novel.

Richard Branson, Virgin founder, writes about adding novelty to freshen up meetings. He invites thought-provoking speakers in diverse fields from astronomy to nanotechnology to get groups thinking in “new, exploratory ways.” And he holds discussions in innovative spaces. Though you may not possess your own private island like Branson, he suggests that anyone can leave the desks behind and head out to the park, because a ”change of scenery and a bit of fun does wonders for getting people thinking differently and loosening up!” (Also see Nilofer Merchant's TED talk on walking meetings and Jason Yip's guide to stand-up meetings.)

Instant Insights /

11 Simple Tips for Having Great Meetings from Some of the World's Most Productive People

Related Stories

Recommended For You