Sometimes the difference between a bad meeting and a better meeting is 5-10 minutes.

As Tony Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project and author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, discusses in this week’s Harvard Business Review IdeaCast. Any significant expulsion of energy has to account for a period of recover. Well with the volume of energy expended during meetings, you can expect meeting participants are going to need a break.

Five Minute Break

Let’s face it meetings take up a significant portion of our day- and most of the time ask us to focus intensely on a subject for a prolonged period of time. But if you’ve ever had a burning issue waiting in your inbox- or heaven forbid needed a restroom break in the middle of an important meeting- your mind has drifted everywhere but the topic at hand. So help a meeting participant out!

Every 90 minutes of meetings = 5 minutes of break time. The longer the meeting is, and the more intense the subject at hand, I’d extend the break time longer. It may seem counter intuitive but these breaks will allow meeting participants to focus on the topic at hand and allow you to reach your goal of ‘Better Meetings’!

Overcoming Objections

Your meeting participants will likely not ask for a break0 no one wants to come across as a slacker. So take off some of the pressure by inserting it into the agenda for them.

Conversely, they’ll be participants that want to ‘charge’ through and get the meeting over with. Well the meeting is likely not to end earlier without a break, because of distracted participants. More likely, not including a break, will keep you from accomplishing your meeting goals! For teams with the ‘charge’ through it attitude you can sneak a break into the agenda by calling it “setup” or “transition” time.

Breaks make meetings better.

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