Friday Challenge: The One-Meeting Challenge
It's Friday!
So you know what that means.
I've got homework for you.
Think about the meetings your organization held this week.
Staff meetings.
Leadership meetings.
Project updates.
Check-ins.Calls that somehow became meetings.
Now choose one.
And ask:
“Did this meeting actually move anything forward?”
Not:
Did everyone attend?
Did we get through the agenda?
Did we spend the scheduled hour together?
But:
What changed because we had it?
Meetings Are an Investment
Every meeting has a cost.
If eight employees spend an hour in a meeting, your organization didn't spend one hour.
It spent eight hours of employee time.
That doesn't automatically make the meeting wasteful. Collaboration, problem-solving and decision-making are valuable.
But the time should produce something.
A decision.
A solution.
A clearer direction.
An assigned action.
A problem prevented.
A customer issue resolved.
Or information people genuinely needed to do their jobs better.
If nobody can identify the outcome, that's worth examining.
Look at the Meeting Like Data
For your chosen meeting, answer five questions:
1. Why did we meet?
Could everyone clearly explain the purpose?
2. Who actually needed to be there?
Attendance shouldn't be automatic.
3. What decision or action came from it?
Identify the result.
4. Could part—or all—of it have been handled another way?
An email, dashboard, shared document or five-minute conversation may sometimes accomplish the same thing.
5. Should we have this meeting again?
Don't let recurring automatically mean necessary.
That's the challenge.
Don't cancel every meeting Monday morning.
Just study one.
Your Friday Assignment
Pick one meeting from this week.
Calculate how much employee time went into it.
Identify what came out of it.
Then choose one thing to keep, shorten, change, combine—or eliminate before the next one.
Because productivity isn't about keeping everyone busy.
It's about making sure their time produces something that matters.
One meeting.
One examination.
One improvement.
Better use of everyone's time.
Champions don't guess. Neither should your business.
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