We all know that meetings can be a waste of time. At Meta there was always a strong desire to keep meetings short and of course that’s a good goal. Hence there were many thirty minute meetings. This was an over-simplification, unfortunately; meetings should be as short as possible to achieve a successful outcome.

Some topics need more than thirty minutes, no matter how smart or well-informed the participants might be. I saw a pattern at Meta where after around twenty minutes of a half hour meeting it would become apparent that we weren’t going to make significant progress. At this point people would get frustrated, realising that the meeting had largely been a waste of time. The answer was often another thirty minute discussion, which some would dread as it seemed just as likely to fail as the initial meeting had.

Allocate the time you need.