15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management pdfdrive com

Meetings start late. Whether a result of unprofessional behavior or the fact
that many people literally have meetings stacked back to back, most meetings
end up starting late. This becomes a cultural phenomenon as late meetings
actually train people to arrive late. When everyone knows the meeting won’t
start until five or ten minutes past the hour, they don’t bother showing up on
time. When dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people in an organization sit
around waiting for other people to arrive, those minutes add up to many hours
over the course of a year.
The wrong people are in the meeting. The default idea seems to be “When
in doubt, invite them!” This wastes the time of the person who was invited (and
who may not have the professional courage to say “no thanks”), and if that
person feels compelled to ask questions or give input, it wastes the time of
everyone else in the meeting, too.

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Parkinson’s law of triviality. Also known as the bike-shed effect, this law
states that organizations spend the most time on trivial issues and the least time
on the most important issues. The story goes that a committee must make several
decisions related to an expensive nuclear power plant. The approval of the power
plant goes quickly with little input because it’s too complicated of a topic for
most participants to weigh in on. Yet when it comes to deciding on the design of
the bike shed for the staff, since everyone understands the trivial project, great
time is spent nitpicking and debating it.
Meetings break up the day in illogical ways and may interfere with flow or
peak concentration times.
The wrong people dominate meetings. By their nature, the overconfident
and the extroverts tend to dominate the communication in a meeting—at the
expense of others who may know more but are less inclined to share a meeting
format.
The Mark Cuban Meeting Rule
I reached out to hundreds of highly successful people as I was doing research for
this book. By design, I was trying to contact the most successful people on the
planet, and knowing that they only have 1,440 minutes a day, it never surprised
me when people didn’t respond to me.
What did surprise me was when billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban
responded to my email only 61 minutes after I sent it.
In his typical direct and to-the-point style, Cuban’s time management advice
described his approach to meetings.