Boost Productivity with the 10-Minute Meeting Rule

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Hey everyone, today's five-minute leader comes from Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney. A lot of people know who he is. He wrote a book he was called the right of a lifetime. It's a great book. I read it. I highly recommend it. One of the leadership hacks that he put into practice was this idea of a 10-minute rule. This 10-minute rule was 10-minute micro meetings.

So, if you think about today's world, how long are our meetings? 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes. And not only that, but everybody seems to get invited to every single meeting, to the point where some of the leaders that I talk to, I look at their calendar, and it's just all-day meetings, and a lot of the meetings they don't even need to be in—they're just meetings so that they don't miss out on stuff.

Meetings today have really been killing time and zapping productivity for a lot of us, which is why I really like Bob Iger's 10-minute Rule, which consists of 10-minute micro meetings focused on a particular topic. So maybe, as a leader, you just want to get a quick update on something. So you schedule 10 minutes with somebody else on your team. You just get the core main points. It's not a whole discussion; it's not a whole presentation. It gives me the things that I need to know as a leader so that I can make the right decisions. Just give me 10 minutes. Where are we? Are we on time? Are we on a budget? Are there particular issues? Great. Move on to the next thing.