Stop This Meeting
30 August 2011
At work we have meetings.
Meetings tend to be self-replicating, self-perpetuating things: The more you have, the less time and attention you spend working and the more meetings you need to talk about how to get the work done.
With one of our clients, during retrospectives, the meeting facilitator draws a segmented circle on the whiteboard. The circle represents an hour and each of the twelve segments represent five minutes. This technique was borrowed from Phil Parker.
Every five minutes the facilitator indicates the passage of time by shading the next segment.
People can glance at the whiteboard to get a sense of how much time they’ve spent in the meeting and how long before it ends.
A simple, visual indication of time passing helps people agree when a topic has dominated the discussion. It also prevents a topic being neglected or worse, needing another meeting.
Motivated by our collective time and attention being sucked into the void I made an automatic version of the whiteboard meeting timer. The timer tells you when to StopThisMeeting.at
Using the timer is simple: Click the circle when the meeting starts. The current segment is coloured blue. Segments change from blue to green every five minutes, indicating elapsed time. Click the circle to reset.
Last week I tried it out during our retrospective. As the facilitator I was able to focus on the content of the discussion without breaking concentration to track the time. When we needed to move on, I simply pointed at the circle.
I’ve also been using the timer on my phone during ad-hoc meetings and stand-ups to help keep things focused. Just make sure the device doesn’t sleep or switch to screensaver mode during the meeting.
Please give the timer a try in your next meeting and let me know how it worked for you.