When it comes to meetings you should sharpen your ax regularly

Lets play a little game.

Imagine you are in a forest. You need to chop down 40 trees.

It only takes you fifteen minutes to chop down the first ten trees – because you’ve got a sharp ax!

You could stop and sharpen your ax, but it takes half an hour – and you need to get on to tree chopping!

It takes you thirty minutes to chop down the next ten trees – because even sharp axes dull eventually.

You could stop and sharpen your ax, but it takes half an hour – and you need to get on to tree chopping!

It takes you two hours to chop down the next ten trees – because now you’re using an axe that resembles a butter knife.

You could stop and sharpen your ax, but it takes half an hour – and you need to get on to tree chopping!

It takes you an exhausting five hours to chop down the last ten trees.

All in all, it took you nearly eight hours.

Maybe you should have stopped and sharpened your ax?

Most of us are too busy chopping down trees trying to reach our quota to stop for a few minutes and sharpen our axes. We all know that, looking at our schedule, some meetings should be canceled, others are never run properly and should be improved on, and that in general, our meetings are poorly planned. We know what needs to be done – we know, in effect, how to sharpen our ax – but we don’t have the time to do it just now, right? We’ll do it tomorrow, or next week, or next month.

We’re always running to the next meeting (it doesn’t have an agenda? Never mind, NEXT time we’ll fix this), or quickly setting up the weekly company meeting (we don’t remember the tasks from the last one? It’s OK, THIS time we’ll write everything down), and we are way too busy to stop and do something which isn’t work-related.

But if we stop to sharpen our ax NOW, we will save time. Lots of time. Just look at the tree chopping exercise above. Instead of working for eight hours, we could have worked for much less, and had a sharp ax at the end to show for it.

So stop. Today. Put aside your meetings for two hours. Learn how to manage them better.

And sharpen your ax.

About Post Author

Edwin Siebesma

Edwin is the former CEO of WinZip Computing as well as VP of sales of the largest electronics and appliances retail chain in The Netherlands and VP of commercial affairs of a large retail chain in Peru. In all these capacities he attended and chaired many meetings and was frustrated by the lack of an integrated tool that followed the entire workflow around meetings from preparing the agenda, writing the minutes to manage tasks. There are many task management tools and note-taking solutions, but nothing covered all stages of a meeting. After leaving WinZip Edwin started Meeting king to help people have more effective meetings.

See author's posts