Chris Fenning shows how to track progress against time in meetings by checking elapsed time and advancement toward your output at regular intervals. If you're halfway through and only one of five planned options is done, you need to speed up or cut scope. This prevents overruns, incomplete results, and extra meetings.
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Hi and welcome to the 15 Steps for Successful Meetings series. This is step number 8: track progress against time. When you're in a meeting, you need to do 2 things. You need to keep an eye on the time and keep an eye on the progress that you're making. When you start a meeting, you have and want to produce a particular output. Well, in the time that you've got for the meeting, whether it's 15 minutes, an hour, 3 hours, How are you doing? How much time has passed and how much progress have you made towards that output? Now, if you don't do this, if you don't keep an eye on both of these things during a meeting, what's going to happen? Well, there are 3 main things. Those 3 things are you're really likely to run out of time. You'll look up, notice that the time is at the end of the meeting, and you'll either scrabble to finish or you're just going to plain run out of meeting and have to rush at the end to wrap things up. The second consequence is you'll have an incomplete output. If you don't keep an eye on the time and you use up too much of it on one part of your output and not all the rest of the things you need to do, then you're not going to do everything that you need in the time. And the third thing is you're very likely to need another meeting. How many times do we get close to the end of a meeting and someone says, oh, so should we schedule something else to finish doing what we were meant to do? Today in this session. This is a really frustrating thing for participants because if you could have completed the work during the time, then having to have another meeting is an extra burden on people's days and on their calendars. So these are the things that happen if you don't keep an eye on time and progress towards the output. So how do you do it? How do you actually do these things? Well, it's quite a simple process and it has 4 steps. First of all, set the target and the direction at the beginning of the meeting. Make it clear what the output is and how much time you've got to do it so everybody in the room is aware. And that means everyone in the room can help keep things on track. Extra sets of eyes looking at the clock. The second step is check the time regularly. Now, I don't mean look at your watch every minute and keep track of it by the second. Look at the time a quarter, a half, three-quarters of the way through your session. Keep an idea on and keep an eye on how time is progressing during that meeting. And third, measure the progress towards the output. When you're halfway through the meeting, are you halfway towards producing what you need? If you get halfway through the meeting and you're only 10% closer to getting what you need at the end of it, then your progress and your time are mismatched and you're not likely to produce the output come the end. And finally, you can use all that information to adjust the meeting if needed. So when you set up a session, if you're halfway through and you realize you're not going to complete everything you need to during the meeting, well, you have an opportunity to either adjust your approach for the rest of that meeting, speed things up, stop sidebar conversations, or you can change the output that you want and recognize that perhaps you might need another session, but you can plan for it and you're not taken by surprise. At the end of the session. Now let's take a quick look at an example. Very simple example. If the output of your meeting is 5 options, that's what you want to produce. You want to produce a list of 5 options. And then halfway through the meeting, 50% of the time has gone, but you've only made 1 out of 5 options by that point. Well, your time and your progress are really mismatched. And you're unlikely to produce the 4 remaining options in the remaining time. Whereas if you'd looked at the clock about a quarter of the way through your meeting, you could then say, okay, we're a quarter of the way through and we've only produced 1 of the 5, probably need to speed it up a little bit. And you'd pay closer attention to it and you'd be far more likely to get the output that you want, which is your final list of 5 options. If you can do this in your meetings, you will have successfully completed step 8 of running successful meetings and you'll have tracked the progress. Against time.
