We live in a meeting heavy world. There are meetings about meetings, meetings about emails and then meetings about how to reduce the amount of meetings and emails we have! Most of us have too many meetings, spend too much time talking, not enough time doing or thinking. Meetings clog up our schedules, suck time from our day and the majority are not worth the salaries of the people who sit there for an hour when you look at the ROI for that hour.

It’s one of the things I definitely don’t miss about my corporate life now I work for myself. Having said that, there’s a very important meeting that I always include in my diary and I feel like it’s one meeting we could all benefit from adding to our meeting heavy cultures.

Getting better at when and how we meet is one thing but making space for something more important is this priority meeting we should have every week. It’s with ourselves.

The most important meeting you can have all week is one that no-one else attends. I call it my self meeting. It’s just me and I have an hour each week where I schedule this meeting. Very often it’s out of the office, somewhere nice where I can find the space to think.

During this meeting my agenda typically looks like; reflecting on the successes, planning the week ahead, where’s the focus, what’s my priority, what do I need and where are the biggest challenges right now? It’s a look at my numbers and what’s in the diary and ensuring this aligns to my priorities and creates enough space to achieve all of what is planned. I use this as a chance to schedule in space and focus time and ensure my self-care and sustainability activities are accounted for too. It’s a time for reflection, thinking, planning and checking in.

Sadly not all of our meetings in the diary provide a return on investment for the time they take.

Ever come from a meeting and wondered why you were there and what it was designed to achieve? That’ll never happen with this meeting. It also makes everything else you do that week more aligned to your priorities, more organised and with better flow. It may also help you reflect on which are actually the meetings you need to be at this week and how you might reduce the load.

We don’t have enough space in our schedule to do some of the most important things that contribute to peak performance. Planning, reflecting and thinking certainly will. The hour you give yourself for this self meeting will save you hours across the week in increased productivity, reduced overwhelm and confusion.