Yes, you need 1:1 meetings, and skipping them is quietly costing you retention, productivity, and trust. Lia walks through the Roses, Buds, Thorns framework and a highlights/lowlights structure you can run in as little as 10 minutes. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel too busy to add another standing meeting.
This episode is part of the 1:1s, Meetings & Time Management series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…the biggest savings is that when we end a meeting on time or maybe three, four, five minutes early, then we are certainly not going over time.”
“…we’re about $2,000 a month that we could be reinvesting into our business if we optimize the time we spend in meetings.”
“…actions and next steps actually should be an agenda item. See that? And now we make sure to cover it and make sure we have time for it.”
“…the most senior person really not sticking to the calendar, not sticking to the schedule, having the conversations run over, showing up late, and it creates a domino effect with everyone else in your team.”
Episode highlights
The $2,000 problem hiding in your calendar
The Wall Street Journal reports the average worker spends about seven and a half hours a week in meetings. If each of those meetings runs over by an average of ten minutes, that adds up to 75 minutes a week, or five full hours a month, per person. Multiply five hours by a $350 hourly rate and you are looking at roughly $1,750 to $2,000 a month slipping away before you even account for your team members’ time. The fix is not a new meeting tool. It is intentionality about what happens inside the time you already have.
Why meetings run over in the first place
Lia is direct: meetings run long because the important stuff gets covered late. Either the agenda was not clear going in, the group got derailed by a topic that showed up mid-meeting, or nobody planned how much time each item actually needed. The result is a frantic scramble in the final 30 seconds to figure out who is doing what, and then the meeting bleeds past its end time because actions and next steps feel too important to skip.
Shift one: share an agenda in advance
Every meeting needs an agenda, and it needs to go out before the meeting, either in the calendar invite or emailed the day before. This gives people time to think, shows up-front what the meeting is actually for, and sometimes leads team members to realize they do not need to attend at all. That is time back for everyone. The agenda also creates a shared contract for the conversation so the group knows when they have drifted off topic.
Shift two: use a parking lot for everything else
When a new idea or topic comes up that is not on the agenda, it goes into the parking lot. Someone keeps a notes doc open, or it goes on the whiteboard. The parking lot signals that the idea matters and will not be forgotten, but it is not for this meeting. If a surprise topic is genuinely more urgent than something already on the agenda, the group can collectively decide to swap one item out and move the original to the parking lot. Either way, the conversation stays on track and no good idea gets lost.
Shift three: set a five-minute timer for actions and next steps
This is the step Lia sees skipped most often. Set a timer for the last five minutes of every meeting. When it goes off, the signal is clear: stop the discussion and move into what happens next. Who owns what? What is the deadline? Actions and next steps are not an afterthought. They are a meeting agenda item, and treating them that way means the meeting actually ends with clarity instead of confusion.
The leadership behavior that creates a domino effect
The most senior person in the room sets the norm. When a leader shows up late, lets conversations run long, or is loose with the schedule, it creates a domino effect across the whole team. People feel anxiety even if the leader thinks they are just being laid back. Starting on time and ending on time is a form of respect, and it signals to the team exactly how to be successful. That consistency matters as much as the tactical shifts.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 182: Still drowning in meetings? How to reclaim 5 or more hours every week as a manager. Most managers lose hours every week because they hold on tighter when they should be letting go. Lia walks through four concrete strategies, from stepping out of meetings and delegating with context to managing your own stress signals and naming the real cut line on your priority list. This episode is most useful for managers who feel perpetually behind and are unknowingly passing that stress straight down to their teams.
- Ep 159: Why your to-do list never gets done (and how to fix it with smarter calendar design). The real reason your week feels like a hamster wheel is context switching, not a lack of effort. Lia walks through three practical calendar moves, grouping similar meetings, planning your week in advance, and color-coding by context, that dramatically cut the mental cost of jumping between tasks. This episode is especially useful for leaders who feel perpetually behind despite working hard.
- Ep 127: How to save 5 to 10 hours a week as a leader (without burning out your team). Leaders lose hours every week to bloated meetings, manual processes, and context they never hand off. Lia walks through a repeatable system, calendar audits, meeting hygiene, process simplification, and intentional delegation, that can reclaim 5 to 10 hours a week for you and up to 30 to 40 hours a month across your team. This episode is especially useful for founders and corporate leaders whose teams have started to notice the overwhelm before they did.
- Ep 89: Why you need 1:1 meetings with every team member (and how to run them well). Yes, you need 1:1 meetings, and skipping them is quietly costing you retention, productivity, and trust. Lia walks through the Roses, Buds, Thorns framework and a highlights/lowlights structure you can run in as little as 10 minutes. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel too busy to add another standing meeting.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
So this is now someone that’s feeling burned out, someone that’s feeling overcapacity carving that hour, getting them that time back to take a break, to take a walk, to slow down a little bit for yourself. What would you do as the business owner of five more hours a month? Maybe take a nice long walk after lunch, the lunch you did not eat at the laptop because you had a little bit extra time. Maybe get a massage.
Hey, maybe you take on an extra client and you use that five hours to reinvest even more money into the business. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today, we are going to talk about a quick way to save thousands of dollars every single month on your team, and that is by optimizing your team meetings. The time that you spend together, making sure that every minute counts, every minute matters, and when you’re done, you’re done.
When I was in the corporate world, it blew my freaking mind how much time was wasted, especially at that lull, like the last five, 10 minutes of a meeting, where it’s wrapped up and people are just still kind of talking, thinking of things, literally saying, what else should we talk about? Just because the timer hadn’t gone off in the meeting or there was still time left. Hey, quick life hack, when the meeting is over, call it, let’s go back, get that time back.
I know it’s not much time. There was a funny tweet I saw, like, thanks for ending the meeting five minutes early. I can now pursue my passions. Okay, I understand we’re not going to do a lot with that time, but the biggest savings is that when we end a meeting on time or maybe three, four, five minutes early, then we are certainly not going over time. How much time do we spend in meetings in the first place?
Well, it really, really varies company to company, industry to industry. I’ve seen stats reporting folks spend about 23 hours a week on average in meetings. I think this is probably more for businesses and industries where people have to meet to get kind of anything done. Okay. I saw that to be the case with certain kinds of roles, managers, executives, when I was in tech. I think if you have work where it’s heads down or people are performing services, it might be a lot less time.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that folks spend about seven and a half hours a week in meetings. So if we take that figure, seven and a half hours a week, and we say, well, on average, that’s probably run over about 10 minutes. So it’s 75 minutes a week times four. That’s 300 minutes a month. So that’s five hours every single month. Time that’s just kind of not accounted for. And when I talked about thousands of dollars a month, if you take your hourly rate, let’s say it’s $350 an hour, and you multiply that by that five hours a month, we’re at $1,750 a month without even adding up the time per employee that we’ve spent.
So we’re about $2,000 a month that we could be reinvesting into our business if we optimize the time we spend in meetings. And I realize, yeah, there’s times when something runs over and it’s useful. But I got to say, I think meetings often run over because we didn’t really get to the meat of the content during the meeting. Or we didn’t really plan on, well, how much time do we need for this conversation? Or we kind of got derailed, and then we got to all the stuff we need to talk about really late.
Optimizing your meeting, getting really, really clear on what you want to talk about, what you want to finish on, and how much time you need, this is going to save you that five hours right off the bat per person. OK? So this is now someone that’s feeling burned out, someone that’s feeling overcapacity, carving that hour, getting them that time back to take a break, to take a walk, to slow down a little bit for yourself. What would you do as the business owner with five more hours a month?
Maybe take a nice long walk after lunch, the lunch you did not eat at the laptop because you had a little bit extra time. Maybe get a massage. Hey, maybe you take on an extra client and you use that five hours to reinvest even more money into the business. Whatever it is, this is time that we do not need to be wasting in going over meetings. And how do we prevent going over meetings? I have three quick tips, super straightforward of what to do and how to get things back on track.
So first tip is to have an agenda for every meeting, something that’s shared in advance so people can think about it. So I think it’s really helpful to put an agenda in the meeting invite or to email it to folks the day before so they can take a look at it. Sometimes this even means people realize they don’t have to attend the meeting and then that’s a whole lot of time they have back. Okay. So the agenda shares with us what we’re going to talk about so everyone’s on the same page.
Number two, when you’re in that meeting to keep on track with the agenda, you want to have some kind of what’s called a parking lot. Maybe it’s someone has a notes document up or you write on the whiteboard. Anytime there’s an idea or thought or thing to talk about that’s not in the agenda, you put it in the parking lot. And this shows that, hey, we can have space for this in our next meeting. We’re not going to forget the idea, but we’re not going to derail the current meeting because this new thought came up.
So having the parking lot allows you to get through everything and make sure you didn’t lose some awesome idea you want to come back to. It’s just not for this meeting. If an idea comes up that is way more important than what’s ever in the agenda, collectively going around and nodding, yes, we’re going to cover this and we’re going to put one of these agenda items over in the parking lot for next time. Last thing, set a timer every single meeting for the last five minutes to talk about actions or next steps.
So when you hear that timer go off, it’s like, oh, okay, now it’s time to wind down and talk about where do we go from here? And this is something I see happen the least in teams I’m supporting, in teams I’ve been on. We kind of get to the last 30 seconds, we’re like, oh my God, wait, who’s doing what? What do we want to do next? And then that’s where we start going over because actions and next steps are really, really important.
We don’t want to not talk about them, but we want to talk about them during that container of the meeting because they’re a part of the meeting. They’re not an afterthought. They’re not something extra that we do once we’ve finished. Accounting for actions and next steps actually should be an agenda item. See that? And now we make sure to cover it and make sure we have time for it. I know this can sound super tactical. I know it can sound like, well, I don’t want to be overly managing my meetings.
We just like to catch up. We like to have conversations. And that is awesome. We can actually account for that. Some teams I’ve worked with have five minutes at the start of every meeting just for catching up to check in with folks. That is a fantastic thing to do and it’s time you’ve accounted for. What I think the agenda allows us to do is to make sure that we are covering the things that we intended to cover, that we have space for creative ideas or other thoughts.
And we create, well, what is the right container for that? Is it to be in this meeting? Is it something we want to discuss over chat or in some messenger or Slack or whatever? Is it something we actually need a different set of people for? That’s one of the big risks when we introduce other things that weren’t in the agenda. We have a conversation with people that are in that room when maybe actually other people are needed for that conversation.
And then we end up having that conversation twice and not the contents of the original meeting. See what I mean? I guess the meta point is to be thoughtful with what we’re talking about, how we’re spending our time, making sure we have a clear ending with actions and next steps, and then really honoring and respecting people’s time. Something that I saw a lot in the corporate world and I also see with business owners is the most senior person really not sticking to the calendar, not sticking to the schedule, having the conversations run over, showing up late, and it creates a domino effect with everyone else in your team.
We want to always be respectful of people’s time. We want to come on time. We want to end on time so that things can be moving forward. And it’s not unclear like, well, are we a team or a company that’s always kind of loosey goosey with what times things are at? The lack of clarity there can cause a lot of anxiety and stress. Even if you feel like, oh, I’m being laid back, your team members may not see it that way.
And defaulting to starting on time, ending on time, really keeping that as the norm, that’s going to keep things moving along so much more faster, so much more productively and everyone’s going to collectively know how to be successful. So there it is, five hours a month, we can shave off or $2,000 every single month. We can get back by having meeting agendas, by having a parking lot for ideas that don’t belong in that meeting, but we want to capture.
And by ending a meeting five minutes early to talk about actions and next steps. I cannot wait to see how this transforms your team. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at LeahGarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn.
See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How much money am I wasting on meetings running over time?
If your team spends around seven and a half hours a week in meetings and each one runs over by about 10 minutes on average, that adds up to five hours a month per person. At an hourly rate of $350, that's roughly $1,750 a month for just your own time, pushing close to $2,000 a month once you factor in your team. That's money you could reinvest in the business, or simply time you could get back to breathe and think.
What is a parking lot in meetings and how does it help keep things on track?
A parking lot is a shared space, like a notes document or a whiteboard, where you capture ideas or topics that come up during a meeting but aren't on the agenda. Instead of derailing the conversation, you write the idea down so it isn't lost, then address it in a future meeting. This keeps the current meeting focused while still honoring good ideas that come up. If a new topic is genuinely more urgent than what's on the agenda, the group can decide together to swap it in and move an agenda item to the parking lot.
Why do my team meetings always run over time and how do I stop it?
Meetings usually run over because the agenda wasn't clear, the conversation got derailed, or actions and next steps got treated as an afterthought. To fix this, share an agenda in advance so everyone knows what's being covered, use a parking lot to hold off-topic ideas without losing them, and set a timer for the last five minutes of every meeting dedicated specifically to actions and next steps. When next steps are built into the meeting as their own agenda item, you stop scrambling at the end and stop going over time.
How do I structure a meeting agenda so my team actually stays on track?
Put the agenda in the meeting invite or email it to your team the day before so people can come prepared. Sometimes people realize they don't even need to attend once they see the agenda, which saves everyone time. Inside the meeting, include actions and next steps as an actual agenda item rather than an add-on at the end. You can also build in a few minutes at the start for casual check-ins if connection matters to your team. The goal is that every topic has a designated place, so nothing gets crowded out and nothing runs long.
Does it matter if I as the business owner start or end meetings a few minutes late?
It matters more than most owners realize. When the most senior person in the room consistently runs over, shows up late, or lets conversations drift, it creates a domino effect across the whole team. People become uncertain about norms, which quietly causes stress and anxiety even if you think you're just being relaxed. Starting on time and ending on time sets a clear, respectful standard. It signals that everyone's time is valued and helps the whole team know what to expect and how to operate.