A productivity expert on the 5 mistakes you're probably making in meetings without realizing it

I recently caught an old episode of Gordon Ramsay's Restaurant Nightmares. In it, a restaurant was run by three owners, leading to all sorts of chaos. Ramsay said it reminded him of an old saying in England: "Too many cooks spoil the broth." The same is true in the boardroom; too many persons involved in a meeting can ruin it.

In talking to clients and in my own experience, meetings are often held with a group of people who don't need to be there. I believe in the "two-pizza rule" made famous by Jeff Bezos. If you can't feed everyone at the meeting with two pizzas, then you've got too many people.

Fix: Only have necessary members attend a meeting.

Brian Tracy likes to say, "Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution." The same goes for meetings. Poorly planned meetings can be worse than no meeting at all. An agenda, with clear goals and outcomes in mind, will transform your meetings.

It's not about how long the meeting is, but that everything that needs to be done gets done. With an agenda in hand, work through the points one by one, crossing them off as you go. Once you finish everything on the agenda, the meeting is over. Don't make the mistake of trying to fill up the allotted time. If your hour-long meeting finishes in 21 minutes, then so be it. A meeting should take as long as it takes, no longer.

Fix: Work from an agenda.

Let's face the facts: so many of us have lousy memories. To be fair, in today's world we suffer from information overload, or what productivity expert Darren Hardy calls "infobesity." It's simply impossible to remember everything.

A study done by two British psychologists, J. Blackburn and EJ Lindgren, revealed some interesting statistics regarding meetings. They tape-recorded a discussion at the end of a Cambridge Psychological Society meeting.

Two weeks later they asked the attendees to write down whatever they could recall about the discussion. The results were telling:

• The average number of points remembered by each person was only 8.4% of those actually recorded.
• 42% of the items remembered were incorrectly remembered — and substantially so.
• Many of the things "remembered" were not said at all or were said on some other occasion.

If this doesn't demonstrate the need for written summaries, I don't know what does.

Fix: Have minutes of the meeting distributed with all essential dates, numbers, and the overall action plan.

Meetings can be broken up into two types: those meant to distribute information and those meant for discussion. Limit the first. There are better ways to distribute information in today's world from videos to online systems that allow you to track any number of data.

As for discussion-based meetings, it's important to remember Parkinson's law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." This goes for meetings as well. Keep your meetings concise. Don't waste time. You want them to be simple "in-and-out" procedures.

I love what the Japanese chip-equipment maker, Disco Corp, implemented. They charge their employees $100 to use a meeting room. Talk about a great way of cutting down on unnecessary meetings.

Fix: Find other, more efficient ways to distribute information. Try and keep meetings for discussions only.