In this episode, Scott Becker explores the benefits of 15-minute meetings, a strategy that enhances efficiency, reduces burnout, and improves focus.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity in Business podcast. We try and bring to you each day things of interest, news, entertainment, and all on private equity in business, and sometimes just body of life episodes. Today's discussion is, and the title of this is the 15-minute meeting. So one of the companies I work with, schedules all of their meetings as 15-minute meetings.
Chapter 2: What are the benefits of 15-minute meetings?
I'm sure not every single one of them, but it seems like 90% of them are scheduled as 15-minute meetings. They call them appointlets, meaning a small appointment. And I think this is absolutely brilliant. And what it does is it forces you to come to the meeting prepared for what you want to discuss or not want to discuss. And they have some flexibility in this.
Chapter 3: How does a 15-minute meeting improve preparation?
It's not as though you're on for 15 minutes and they cut the clock immediately. Rather, they let you continue to talk and so forth. But the concept of setting the stage that we're having a 15 minute meeting versus an hour meeting versus a 30 minute meeting, There are so many things that are good about it. It makes for much more effective use of time.
Chapter 4: What makes 15-minute meetings more effective?
It helps to avoid burnout because you're not sitting there dawdling for an hour over stuff. It just is a fantastic concept and process. We love this concept. We think we have adopted it for our podcast. We almost always set up a 30 minute recording session for our podcast, but often get done. Our aim is to be done in 15 minutes. And I think it's incredibly useful to both the listener and
the person who's the podcast guest, and then to myself, of course, and our team, our production team. The other thing I'll tell you is years ago at our conferences, this was before TED conferences and all those kinds of stuff, we moved to shorter sort of sessions, 30 to 40 minutes versus the hour or longer. And what we found was the most fascinating dynamic. What we found was that people –
wanted to speak for longer, but their audience wanted to speak for shorter. So we'd have speakers say, I need more time. And we'd have audience members almost universally say, we need less time. Because the audience doesn't want to sit still for an hour lecture. 30, 40 minutes is more than enough. I think it's a fascinating thing. So I'm a huge fan of this company that does this.
It's a company called Book Launchers. The 15-minute appointment. And I just love what they do with it. It makes everything so much more efficient. And I'll tell you as an aside, one of the people I work with there is a woman named Sarah Bean, who just could not be any better. Thank you so much for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Thank you very, very much.