Make Meetings 5 Minutes Shorter

Dec 17, 2018 business

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

Having many meetings, one after another, is not only tiring, it’s a recipe for memory disaster. You don’t have enough time between meetings to finish notes, gather your thoughts or even use the bathroom. Because of this, I’ve started doing something different:

Make 30 minute meetings 25 minutes long, make 1 hour long meetings 50 minutes.

For a quick 25 minute meeting, there is enough time to finish taking notes, go to the next meeting room, grab a snack, etc. With longer meetings, it’s important to have a good bit of time between to collect your thoughts.

There are tools to do this built into a lot of common calendar applications as well.

Google Calendar

Open up google calendar, then click the gear icon and choose settings. Under the Event settings heading, click Speedy meetings. This will change the defaults to these new values of 25, 50.

Mac Calendar App

Open up your terminal application and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.iCal "Default duration in minutes for new event" -int 25

Close the app and re-open it.

This won’t change defaults for everything in the drop down for new events - but it creates 25 minute meetings by default. If you want a 50 minute meeting, you’ll have to change that yourself.

Fantastical Mac App

Open up your terminal application and type the following:

defaults write com.flexibits.fantastical2.mac DefaultEventDuration 1500

The amount is in seconds, so 1,500 seconds = 25 minutes. Close the app and re-open it.

Again, this won’t change all of the defaults and make 50 minute options as well. But, when you create a brand new event, it’ll default to 25 minutes.