1. Keep meetings to 15 minutes “Work expands to the time you schedule for it.” For this reason, you may want to keep meetings to 15 minutes or shorter, whenever possible.
2. Set a timer—yep, a real timer
3. Take the chairs away “The ‘stand-up meeting’ has come to mean more than just a meeting where everyone stands up. It refers to a daily team meeting where team members receive status updates on the latest happenings.
We have stand-up meetings at Buffer, and since we’re a distributed team that connects online, our stand-ups don’t necessarily mean we all stand up (although some of us could be standing, I guess!).”
4. No laptops for note-taking. A study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer looked at the note-taking habits of college students from Princeton and UCLA. Students watched a 15-minute TED talk video, taking notes along the way.
Researchers compared those who took notes by hand and those who took notes on a laptop and found that while the factual recall of knowledge was similar, the conceptual recall had a clear winner. Those who took notes by hand did significantly better on understanding concepts.
5. Create a coat check for cell phones
