If your schedule your meeting for one hour, and then your meeting lasts exactly one hour, you have failed.

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If you schedule an hour for a meeting, and your meeting lasts for an hour, you have failed, for three reasons:

  1. The efficient person attempts to complete tasks in less than the allotted time. If you've given yourself 60 minutes to complete a task and require all 60 minutes to do so, you have not been efficient.  
     
  2. Meetings that end early are always perceived more positively than those that end on time or later. Ending your meeting on time eliminates this simple means of improving the perception of every meeting that you conduct.  
     
  3. What are the odds that you have precisely 60 minutes of content to cover in your meeting?Not likely.

This means that you are either filling time because you are a rule-following completist who oddly believes that an hour scheduled must equal an hour filled, or you have scheduled too much content for your meeting and have either failed to complete your agenda (which is always frustrating to attendees) or are rushing through items that deserve greater attention. 

Not good either way. 

Here is the correct mindset for every meeting that you plan:

“I have scheduled 60 minutes for this meeting. I will be thorough but efficient. Every minute under the 60 minutes that I have allotted brings me closer to superhero status. 

I want to be a superhero. 

Now...  which of the items on my agenda could be sent as an email to save everyone some time?”

I hate meetings this much.

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Want to know how much I hate meetings?

In August of 1999, I began my teaching career. Each school year starts off with a series of meetings a couple days before the kids arrive that may be absolutely necessary but are still excruciating because I hate meetings.

As I prepared to attend this first of what has been thousands upon thousands of meetings over the course of my teaching career, I was introduced to Jennifer, a new teacher also beginning her career. But because she was hired just a couple days before the start of school, she was permitted to skip this first meeting in order to prepare her classroom.

I still work with Jennifer. Today we teach fifth grade together.

It's been eighteen years since we began our teaching careers, and I'm still mad about the meeting that she got to skip and I did not.

Nearly two decades later, I still remember it, and I'm still angry about it.

I'm not kidding.