In the early 90s I had a new department director who would bring a kitchen timer to every meeting. Meetings started on precisely on time and the timer was set to 22 minutes. When that bell rung, you could finish the thought, but the meeting would break at the 25 minute mark. If you didn’t accomplish the agenda, another meeting could be set, but it needed to be at least 2 hours after the one that just broke. Even meetings without him had to follow the rule. He also had a request that were were supposed to follow if we could, which was to allow ourselves to only schedule one meeting in an hour.

Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:

- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion

- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting

- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.

Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.

I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.