How To Put Your Meetings On Autopilot In 2016

Welcome to 2016., the year in which you’ll have more meetings than ever before. In order not to spend all year running from meeting to meeting instead of doing important work, it’s time to put ALL your meetings on autopilot. How? Let’s first discover… why!

Is Your Day Full of Meetings?

Yes, it is. So is mine. No matter what industry you work in, there comes a point in your career when you have more meetings than “actual work”. You spend your days meetings colleagues, partners or clients in order to go over projects that you can’t then deliver because you have no time – your schedule is packed with meeting, after meeting, after meeting… You get the point.

Hey, Meetings Are Important!

Meeting with potential clients or your team is an important way of getting on the same page and it doesn’t make you busy. However, it doesn’t make you even a bit more productive. It’s busy work that does fill up your schedule but doesn’t amount to getting things done. Think about it: You can have all the meetings in the world, but will you have anything to show your boss at the end of the month? Will you finish projects to pay the bills if you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer?

Even salespeople, whose job description more than any other includes going on meetings, have to take their time and create deliverables. No one goes to a meeting to have a meeting. They expect a proposal or a finished project as a result.

Stop Doing Shallow Work

Some call it shallow work because we can always find time to do it. The other name is reactive or managerial tasks that are more akin to doing administration than creative work that pays the bills and that we want to do. Emails, endless meetings, reorganising your calendar… It’s basically all the same.

The best description I’ve heard about deep (creative) vs. shallow work is quite simple: While shallow work will keep you from being fired (you’re going to so many meetings!), it’s the deep work that will get your promoted (you’ve sent so many proposals!).

What To Do About So Many Meetings?

Ok, it makes sense. You’re going to try to focus on doing as much creative work as you can. Unfortunately, your calendar has meetings in various parts of the day which will end up distracting you from the task at hand.

The answer is: Batch processing.

As Wikipedia even says, ‘Batch processing is the execution of a series of programs (“jobs”) on a computer without manual intervention.” Oh, wait, you’re not a computer?

In that case, as ‘Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World’ author Michael Hyatt explains: “Batch processing is the grouping of similar tasks that require similar resources to streamline their completion.”

Batch processing comes from industries such as car manufacturing where you set up the same resources (tired, parts) in such a way to make each step of completing a car that much easier.

We don’t have cars or tires for that matter. We have meetings.

How to ‘Batch Process’ Your Meetings?

Why do you accept meetings requests at any part of your day? Because you can? Stop it and take control of your meetings by ‘batch processing’ them together at a certain time of day or on a certain day. It doesn’t matter if you prefer having all your meetings on a Tuesday or every work day after 3 pm.

There are a couple of great advantages to putting your meetings in ‘batches’:

• You know exactly what times to propose when to have a meeting
• You can work on your creative, deep work at the time of day or days when you KNOW you won’t have any meetings
• You can save time and money by defining a close area to hold all your meetings in
• Because you are grouping similar tasks, you can prepare for all of them at the same time

Meetings on Autopilot? Get a Booking App

There’s one more, simple yet powerful way, to automate your meetings further. Instead of just putting meetings at a specific time in your calendar you can save HOURS of your time by letting people book those predefined slots in advance!

It’s very easy to setup and you can get your calendar “booking” for free with the YouCanBook.Me app that will integrate automagically with your Google Calendar. You just send a link to the person you want the meeting with and they choose a slot. Simple! Get your calendar slots!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=jZg0C8rpOfY

4 days into January and you’ve already put your meetings on autopilot by realising the difference between shallow and deep work, as well as using ‘batch processing’. Not bad.