The Founder & The Force Multiplier: How Entrepreneurs and Executive Assistants Achieve More Together

by Adam Hergenrother

A Harvard Business Review article, “The Leader’s Calendar” (July-August 2018), reported that a survey of CEOs found they had an average of 37 meetings in any given week, taking up 72 percent of their total working time.

If two pizzas aren’t enough to feed the people in the room, there are too many people in the meeting. Meetings become inefficient and ineffective when there are 15-plus people in the room. Last year, during our brutal elimination of meetings, we also recalibrated who needed to be in the room and took one meeting from 12 people down to 8. The meeting was cut down to about 15 minutes. And focus and productivity increased.

I use a document called a 411 from the book The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan (which is a must-read for increased productivity and better time management).