Imagine this, you are planning a three hours meeting. Perfect, you have three hours to discuss and take decisions. That's a lot right? Hmmm, let's do some math to verify that.

Usually, Bob is always about 5 minutes late and Anna needs a coffee. After that, about 10 minutes are needed to remind everybody what the meeting is all about, and for them to greet each other. So 5 plus 10, that's already 15 minutes less for the introduction. Yeah, I'm really good with math.

The same goes for the conclusion. You will need about 15 minutes to summarize the key decisions, setup the next appointment, and do the other housekeeping stuff like cleaning the room for the next people who will use it.

Oh wait! 15+15, that's already 30 minutes lost without doing anything productive in your meeting!

And it gets even worse! 3 hours of meeting, means Anna is gonna need to have little break to pee because she drinks so much coffee. So let's give her 10 short minutes to go the toilets.

So now we are at 30+10. That's, 40 minutes which are already out of the meeting. More than 20%, exactly 22.22222% of the meeting is already scheduled for other natural stuff that you can't take out. Anna needs to go the toilets. You need to let people greet each other. And there is no way Bob arrives on time because he comes from the French speaking part of Switzerland.

So, your three hour meeting, is now a 2 hour and 20 minutes meeting.

This little math story shows that we are pretty bad at realizing how much time we really have when it comes to meetings. If you mentally planned for 3 hours of productive conversation you will surely get frustrated and ask yourself: where did all the time go?

So here are three things you can do to ensure that time doesn't break your next meeting:

1. Realize that you have less time than planned

2. Set a buffer time

3. Set a visible timer for each topic