How the Best CEOs Get the Important Work Done

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If you’re a chief executive officer, your job is to execute. It’s written right into your title. But what does it mean, in terms of daily tasks, to be the company’s top “executer?” After all, CEOs don’t actually build factories or sell products.

It’s tempting, therefore, to view the CEO as primarily a thinker; someone who mulls and shapes strategy. That is a part of the CEO’s job, of course. But the best CEOs know that strategy is just theory unless it’s actually translated into frontline routines―unless the rest of the company actually is executing the strategy.

The CEO’s job is to make sure that happens. The best CEOs focus primarily on four things: communication, communication, communication, and overseeing resource allocation to ensure that the priorities they’re communicating are actually the ones getting funded.
The problem with the first three of those tasks: It can be incredibly boring. The same messages must be repeated again and again ad nauseam. But the best CEOs resist the desire to chase the next shiny object. They stick maniacally to their communication role to guarantee that the strategy is baked into frontline routines and behaviors.

And just because it’s repetitive doesn’t mean it’s easy. First-time CEOs often feel like their own company is conspiring to drown out those messages. Based on our research and decades of experience working with CEOs, here are six tips for CEOs who want to get the boring—and most important—stuff done:

Liberate yourself from your own staff. Your time and your energy are your most valuable resources. Focus them on what’s most important and start saying “no” to people—starting with your immediate staff. The average CEO inherits a staff committed to serving the institutional requirements of the office of CEO, not the CEO’s strategic agenda. If you don’t ruthlessly protect your time, you will watch your calendar rapidly fill up with retirement parties, ribbon cuttings and other corporate tasks that have nothing to do with advancing the strategy.

Many CEOs apply a 60/40 rule: They devote 60 per cent of their time to “must-do” tasks like governance and investor relations and the other 40 per cent to personal focus on strategic execution. And they constantly review the 60 percent to decide if really need to do them or can delegate them to others. One pharmacy retail chain CEO who wasn’t particularly good at investor relations simply hired people who were better and entrusted them with that duty.

Disentangle yourself from the Byzantine bickering of the professional managerial class. Most companies have a professional managerial class that absorbs way too much time and energy and distracts CEOs—and others—from focusing on customers and the front line. CEOs can waste a massive amount of time simply tending to the egos and petty squabbles of professional managers―time better spent connecting directly with the front line and solving their needs. I recognize this sounds harsh; it is. Of course, every organization needs professional managers, and many of the great value-creation stories of business can be traced to their efforts. But we have to be honest: If we can point to companies that are under-managed, we must also point the finger at companies that are over-managed, where the professional managerial class appears to spend as much time perpetuating its own agenda as it does supporting the front line.

As part of the ongoing research effort for our book, The Founder’s Mentality, we’ve studied why companies retain or lose the characteristics that help them avoid growth-killing complexity and stay focused on their insurgent mission to serve customers. Our surveys, research and extensive interviews suggest that this sense of mission fades first and fastest at the upper and middle layers of the company as they become diluted with professional managers.

Professional managers tend to worry most about stakeholders somewhere in their own office. They are more likely to tell their family about face time with the CEO than about solving some faceless customer’s problem. Avoid becoming a dinner table boast and instead spend your time maintaining the energy and sense of mission of the frontline employees who devote their day to serving customers or supporting those who do.

Laminate your “strategy on a page” and find joy in talking about it for the thousandth time. The best CEOs create some sort of strategy on a page. I’ve known some who laminate it to survive the 1,000 conversations they initiate. They constantly remind everyone what matters in the simplest terms possible. How a CEO spends his or her own time sends a powerful message about what matters to the business, but that doesn’t let them off the hook on the boring part of the job: They still must repeat that message over and over and over again.

We even argue that CEOs should focus on a “strategy on a hand” (which liberates them from their laminates). The thumb represents a simple, jargon-free description of “why we exist,” and the fingers are the three to four ways the company must excel to make that happen. At Indian consumer products company CavinKare, the thumb is “Whatever a rich man enjoys, the common man should be able to afford, and our job is to find a way to solve this.” At one Brazilian retailer, it’s “To give aspiring lower-class consumers the opportunity to own furniture, ‘white goods’ and consumer electronics by helping them solve their financing needs.” At Google, it would be “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The best CEOs instinctively distill an often complex strategy into a few clear elements that can easily cascade through the organization, and they revel in making that happen. “The role of a CEO is to simplify the complexity and stick to a few themes that are easy to understand,” the CEO of one luxury goods company told us. Or, as an airline CEO reflected in a recent conversation with us, “In any company I’ve been in, there haven’t been very many people who are capable of standing back and making the complicated things very simple. Yet that’s where the real value is.”

Celebrate the doers. Every company needs thinkers, but CEOs need to fight the natural tendency of corporate hierarchies to glorify them. Instead, they must remind everyone that it is the doers—the key employees who directly support customers—whose actions advance the mission of the company.

“My sales force are the heroes of my business,” the CEO of one consumer goods company told us. “I want them to sell all day, outhustle the competition, get our products onto the right shelves at the right width and height. I’ve told them over and over that they are not the brains of the company, but the arms, legs, ears and eyes.”

He continued: “For example, if the sales reps see new competitive activity or something interesting in-store that worries them or presents an opportunity, they take a photo with their smartphone, write a few lines about the issue and send them off to the heads of sales and trade marketing. Then they go back to selling. The thinkers back at headquarters get about 150 pictures a week, some of which get translated by the marketing staff into new sales initiatives. And every month, the company gives an award for the best new sales initiative―not to the marketing department, but to the sales rep whose photo triggered the new initiative.”

Be the question guy, not the answer guy. Thousands of issues can distract a CEO from what really matters. You don’t need to solve every problem. As the CEO of one food company told us: “I need to know about those issues and I would be cross if I didn’t. But I don’t have to fix them.” If a problem is getting in the way of the doers, you should make sure it gets solved. Otherwise, it can probably be delegated to someone on your team to figure out. Most CEOs start the job believing they need to have all the answers, but over time they realize they need to have good questions, such as “How does this activity help translate our strategy into frontline behaviors and results?” There it is, the boring part again.

Ignore the conventional wisdom of coaches. CEOs hear a lot of bad advice urging them to stay in their box and work through the management structure. Watch out for these phrases:

• “The CEO should look up and out.” This is the notion that the CEO’s job is to manage the board and outside stakeholders, leaving day-to-day operations of the companies to others. This is poppycock. One would hope the CEO attained his or her position by being one of the best operators in the business. Why abandon that strength once they are in the ultimate position to exercise it throughout the company?
• “The CEO should work through the layers and not connect directly with the front line.” Nonsense. Messages must be delivered directly. We’ve all played the game of telephone as kids and know the twaddle that emerges at the end of the chain. A CEO who communicates through layers is a CEO who dooms the organization to drivel. This doesn’t mean you ignore the management layers in between – bring them along, share the stage and debrief and coach them afterwards. But deliver messages directly.
• “The CEO must rise above the details of the business.” Total nonsense. Revenue comes from customers, and customers care massively about the details of the business. Deep customer loyalty is born of the infinite decisions required to get these details right. The CEO must live here.
• “The CEO’s job is to set the strategic direction and then leave the execution to others.” Utter nonsense. Strategy is meaningless without execution. Execution is where strategy turns into results. Do both.

And yes, execution by communication can be boring. Yet you will often find that the messages need repeating—and that each time you do, you learn a lot about what’s working and what isn’t in different parts of your company. In the long run, these simple messages make your job much easier. Performance management gets linked to these simple themes. That, in turn, encourages leaders throughout the organization to absorb and live the same priorities. It shows employees that their own path to success is tightly linked to strategy. And clear, simple themes win over investors and analysts, too.

Here’s the rub. Ultimately, you need to find joy in this. And there is joy. Each conversation is an opportunity for mutual discovery, for mutual insight. You can be successful as a CEO only if you can mobilize the hearts and minds of thousands, so you must love this mobilization and take joy in helping each group and each individual discover what the strategy means for them. CEOs don’t lead companies, they lead a collection of people who all need to move in the same direction. And that demands a thousand conversations.

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James Allen is a partner in Bain & Company’s London office and a co-head of the firm’s global strategy practice. He also leads Bain’s Founder’s Mentality 100 initiative. He is a co-author of a number of bestselling books including Profit from the Core and The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth (Harvard Business Review Press, June 2016).

7 Tips for Managing Your Schedule Like a Pro

Something Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, once said has stuck in my head: "Never let anyone own your schedule." It's simple and obvious, yet genius.

Over the years, whenever I didn't follow this advice, I was stressed and unproductive. Gradually I learned that planning and following a routine makes a huge difference in how I feel and what I get done. Here are some of the things that help me manage my schedule that you may find helpful:

1. Create a routine

No matter what you are working on, create a routine. Block times for specific activities, and stick with the plan. Turn your calendar into a bunch of blocks, and put activities into those blocks. Whatever is not planned, you don't do. If you want free time, plan it.

Your routine may change through the year, but at any given time it's better to have a plan. For example, if you are working on launching a company, and need to do customer discovery, coding and hiring, then prioritize and block specific times for each activity. 

Here is a sample calendar I made that illustrates some of the concepts and ideas from this post.

2. Group meetings and calls into blocks

For example, if you need to have outside meetings, block two and a half days a week for those meetings, and go to the outside meetings only during those times. Do the same thing for in-office meetings. This way you are not only creating a chunk of time for meetings, you are also creating other blocks of time that you will be able to important work. Do the same thing with calls, and book them all back to back.

3. Optimize time for different meeting types

Personally, I am now a big fan of 30-minute meetings and 10-minute calls. I think 10-minute calls are a great way to initially connect with someone or give someone quick advice. You can do a Google Hangout or Skype if you prefer to see the person instead of just hearing them. The reason 10-minute calls work is because people skip BS and get to the point. Try it. Ten minutes is actually a lot of time, if you focus. I prefer to do these calls on Fridays, when I am usually working from home.

I am not a big fan of introductory coffee meetings, lunches and dinners. I am a huge fan of coffee and meals with people I already know. Those meetings are typically productive and fun, but the first time you are meeting someone, it's more productive to do a call or an actual 30-minute meeting in the office. 

Here are the types of meetings you might want to book:

• 30-minute meeting in the office to get to know someone or catch up
• 45-minute meeting outside of the office. Allow 15 minutes for travel.
• 10-minute call to help someone who needs advice
• 15-minute daily standup -- great for startups and engineering teams
• 30-minute weekly staff meeting

Whatever meetings you hold, group them into blocks depending on your particular schedule. If you feel like a particular type of meeting needs more or less time, then adjust the block accordingly.

4. Use appointment slots

There is a great feature in Google Calendar called Appointment Slots. It allows you to book a chunk of time, and then split it into pieces. For example, I can book three hours of outside meetings and then split it into three meetings -- one hour each. Or I can book one hour of calls and split it into six calls at 10 minutes each. There is also a bunch of specific tools, such as doodle, that do that too. 

The next step is to create bit.ly links for different blocks of time.You can have a link for your outside meetings, another link for 30-minute inside meetings and yet another one for 10-minute calls. You then share these links, and they can book the time with you. I've done this with Techstars candidate companies and it was amazingly effective. It minimized the back and forth on email and saved a ton of time for me and the companies

This won't work with everyone, because some people may find this rude. In any case, if you are not comfortable sending the link to a someone, then you can use your own appointment slots, suggest a few meeting times, and then book the specific slot yourself.

If you are asking someone to meet, always propose several specific alternative times such as Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m. on Wednesday. David Tisch gave a great talk that covers scheduling meetings and many more basics of communication. 

5. Block time for email

This is the most important tip in the whole post. Email will own you unless you own it. To own your email you must avoid doing it all the time. To do that you need to schedule the time to do your email. It is absolutely a must. In fact it is so important that I wrote a whole entire post about managing email.

6. Plan your exercise and family time

Unless you put it on the calendar, it won't get done. Well, that applies to your exercise and time with your family. Whether you go in the morning, afternoon or evening, do it three times a week or every day, put exercise time on the calendar. My friend and mentor Nicole Glaros makes it very clear that her mornings, until 10 a.m., belong to her. She hits the pavement or the gym, depending on the weather, and rarely deviates from her routine. 

The same applies to planning time with your family and significant others. If you are a workaholic like me, you will end up stealing time from your family unless you book it in advance and train yourself to promptly unplug. Many people in the industry have talked about planning family time. My favorite is Brad Feld, who talks about it a lot.

7. Actually manage your time

I think about my time a lot. I think about where it goes. I think about where can I get more of it, and how to optimize it. When I was running GetGlue, I had an assistant who was managing my time. She was awesome. But when I joined Techstars, I decided that I will manage my calendar myself. I have to confess that I am happy about this decision.

I find myself thinking about what I am doing, who am I meeting with and why a lot more. I meet with a lot of people every week. My schedule is particularly insane during the selection process. Yet, because I manage my calendar, follow a routine, plan meetings in blocks and use appointment slots, I find myself less overwhelmed and less stressed.

Taking ownership of my calendar and planning my days and weeks made me a happier and more productive human. I hope this post helps you get there too. 

I would love to hear your productivity tips. How do you manage your time? How do you handle your calendar? What tools do you use? Please share in the comments section below.

This article was written by a member of the AlleyNYC contributor network. AlleyNYC is one of the world’s largest innovation hubs, helping foster the growth of startups in its flagship location in New York City. Entrepreneur Media is a partner and investor in AlleyNYC.

Lack Of Time is Not The Problem

Make Time for the Work That Matters

To identify the tasks you need to drop or outsource, take this interactive assessment.

More hours in the day. It’s one thing everyone wants, and yet it’s impossible to attain. But what if you could free up significant time—maybe as much as 20% of your workday—to focus on the responsibilities that really matter?

We’ve spent the past three years studying how knowledge workers can become more productive and found that the answer is simple: Eliminate or delegate unimportant tasks and replace them with value-added ones. Our research indicates that knowledge workers spend a great deal of their time—an average of 41%—on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled competently by others. So why do they keep doing them? Because ridding oneself of work is easier said than done. We instinctively cling to tasks that make us feel busy and thus important, while our bosses, constantly striving to do more with less, pile on as many responsibilities as we’re willing to accept.

We believe there’s a way forward, however. Knowledge workers can make themselves more productive by thinking consciously about how they spend their time; deciding which tasks matter most to them and their organizations; and dropping or creatively outsourcing the rest. We tried this intervention with 15 executives at different companies, and they were able to dramatically reduce their involvement in low-value tasks: They cut desk work by an average of six hours a week and meeting time by an average of two hours a week. And the benefits were clear. For example, when Lotta Laitinen, a manager at If, a Scandinavian insurance company, jettisoned meetings and administrative tasks in order to spend more time supporting her team, it led to a 5% increase in sales by her unit over a three-week period.

While not everyone in our study was quite that successful, the results still astounded us. By simply asking knowledge workers to rethink and shift the balance of their work, we were able to help them free up nearly a fifth of their time—an average of one full day a week—and focus on more worthwhile tasks with the hours they saved.

Why It’s So Hard 
Knowledge workers present a real challenge to managers. The work they do is difficult to observe (since a lot of it happens inside their heads), and the quality of it is frequently subjective. A manager may suspect that an employee is spending her time inefficiently but be hard-pressed to diagnose the problem, let alone come up with a solution.

We interviewed 45 knowledge workers in 39 companies across eight industries in the United States and Europe to see how they spent their days. We found that even the most dedicated and impressive performers devoted large amounts of time to tedious, non-value-added activities such as desk work and “managing across” the organization (for example, meetings with people in other departments). These are tasks that the knowledge workers themselves rated as offering little personal utility and low value to the company. 

The Work That Knowledge Workers Do 
There are many reasons why this happens. Most of us feel entangled in a web of commitments from which it can be painful to extricate ourselves: We worry that we’re letting our colleagues or employers down if we stop doing certain tasks. “I want to appear busy and productive—the company values team players,” one participant observed. Also, those less important items on our to-do lists are not entirely without benefit. Making progress on any task—even an inessential one—increases our feelings of engagement and satisfaction, research has shown. And although meetings are widely derided as a waste of time, they offer opportunities to socialize and connect with coworkers. “I actually quite look forward to face-to-face meetings,” one respondent told us. “A call is more efficient, but it’s a cold, lifeless medium.”

Organizations share some of the blame for less-than-optimal productivity. Cost-cutting has been prevalent over the past decade, and knowledge workers, like most employees, have had to take on some low-value tasks—such as making travel arrangements—that distract them from more important work. Even though business confidence is rebounding, many companies are hesitant to add back resources, particularly administrative ones. What’s more, increasingly complicated regulatory environments and tighter control systems in many industries have contributed to risk-averse corporate cultures that discourage senior people from ceding work to less seasoned colleagues. The consequences are predictable: “My team is understaffed and underskilled, so my calendar is a nightmare and I get pulled into many more meetings than I should,” one study subject reported. Another commented, “I face the constraint of the working capacity of the people I delegate to.” 

Some companies do try to help their knowledge workers focus on the value-added parts of their job. For example, one of us (Jordan Cohen) helped Pfizer create a service called pfizerWorks, which allows employees to outsource less important tasks. We’ve also seen corporate initiatives that ban e-mail on Fridays, put time limits on meetings, and forbid internal PowerPoint presentations. But it’s very difficult to change institutional norms, and when knowledge workers don’t buy in to such top-down directives, they find creative ways to resist or game the system, which only makes matters worse. We propose a sensible middle ground: judicious, self-directed interventions supported by management that help knowledge workers help themselves.
 
What Workers Can Do Our process, a variant of the classic Start/Stop/Continue exercise, is designed to help you make small but significant changes to your day-to-day work schedule. We facilitated this exercise with the 15 executives mentioned above, and they achieved some remarkable results. 

Identify low-value tasks. Using this self-assessment, look at all your daily activities and decide which ones are (a) not that important to either you or your firm and (b) relatively easy to drop, delegate, or outsource. Our research suggests that at least one-quarter of a typical knowledge worker’s activities fall into both categories, so you should aim to find up to 10 hours of time per week. The participants in our study pinpointed a range of expendable tasks. Lotta Laitinen, the manager at If, quickly identified several meetings and routine administrative tasks she could dispense with. Shantanu Kumar, CEO of a small technology company in London, realized he was too involved in project planning details, while Vincent Bryant, a manager at GDF SUEZ Energy Services, was surprised to see how much time he was wasting in sorting documents. 

Decide whether to drop, delegate, or redesign. Sort the low-value tasks into three categories: quick kills (things you can stop doing now with no negative effects), off-load opportunities (tasks that can be delegated with minimal effort), and long-term redesign (work that needs to be restructured or overhauled). Our study participants found that this step forced them to reflect carefully on their real contributions to their respective organizations. “I took a step back and asked myself, ‘Should I be doing this in the first place? Can my subordinate do it? Is he up to it?’” recalls Johann Barchechath, a manager at BNP Paribas. “This helped me figure out what was valuable for the bank versus what was valuable for me—and what we simply shouldn’t have been doing at all.” Another participant noted, “I realized that the big change I should make is to say no up-front to low-value tasks and not commit myself in the first place.” 

Off-load tasks. We heard from many participants that delegation was initially the most challenging part—but ultimately very rewarding. One participant said he couldn’t stop worrying about the tasks he had reassigned, while another told us he had trouble remembering “to push, prod, and chase.” Barchechath observed, “I learned about the importance of timing in delegating something—it is possible to delegate too early.”

Most participants eventually overcame those stumbling blocks. They delegated from 2% to 20% of their work with no decline in their productivity or their team’s. “I overestimated my subordinate’s capability at first, but it got easier after a while, and even having a partially done piece of work created energy for me,” Barchechath said. A bonus was that junior employees benefited from getting more involved. “[She] told me several times that she really appreciated it,” he added. Vincent Bryant decided to off-load tasks to a virtual personal assistant and says that although he was concerned about getting up to speed with the service, “it was seamless.” 

Allocate freed-up time. The goal, of course, is to be not just efficient but effective. So the next step is to determine how to best make use of the time you’ve saved. Write down two or three things you should be doing but aren’t, and then keep a log to assess whether you’re using your time more effectively. Some of our study participants were able to go home a bit earlier to enjoy their families (which probably made them happier and more productive the next day). Some unfortunately reported that their time was immediately swallowed up by unforeseen events: “I cleared my in-box and found myself firefighting.”

But more than half reclaimed the extra hours to do better work. “For me the most useful part was identifying the important things I don’t get time for usually,” Kumar said. “I stopped spending time with my project planning tool and instead focused on strategic activities, such as the product road map.” Laitinen used her freed-up schedule to listen in on client calls, observe her top salespeople, and coach her employees one-on-one. The result was that stunning three-week sales jump of 5%, with the biggest increases coming from below-average performers. A questionnaire showed that employee responses to the experiment were positive, and Laitinen found that she missed nothing by dropping some of her work. “The first week was really stressful, because I had to do so much planning, but by the middle of the test period, I was more relaxed, and I was satisfied when I went home every day.” 

Commit to your plan. Although this process is entirely self-directed, it’s crucial to share your plan with a boss, colleague, or mentor. Explain which activities you are getting out of and why. And agree to discuss what you’ve achieved in a few weeks’ time. Without this step, it’s all too easy to slide back into bad habits. Many of our participants found that their managers were helpful and supportive. Laitinen’s boss, Sven Kärnekull suggested people to whom she could delegate her work. Other participants discovered that simply voicing the commitment to another person helped them follow through. 

With relatively little effort and no management directive, the small intervention we propose can significantly boost productivity among knowledge workers. Such shifts are not always easy, of course. “It’s hard to make these changes without the discipline of someone standing over you,” one of our study participants remarked. But all agreed that the exercise was a useful “forcing mechanism” to help them become more efficient, effective, and engaged employees and managers. To do the same, you don’t have to redesign any parts of an organization, reengineer a work process, or transform a business model. All you have to do is ask the right questions and act on the answers. After all, if you’re a knowledge worker, isn’t using your judgment what you were hired for?

Julian Birkinshaw is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School and the author of Becoming a Better Boss. Jordan Cohen is a productivity expert at PA Consulting Group and the recipient of the 2010 grand prize from the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) for his previous work at Pfizer.

The No. 1 Way to Kill Productivity

You don't mean to do it, but in most offices it's hard to avoid. Bosses, don't give in to this time-suck.

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Here's my nightmare scenario: I pull out my phone to call up my calendar for the next day, only to find that the entire day--we're talking 8 a.m. to 6p.m. (or later)--is booked solid with meetings. What happened to, um, actual work?

It's safe to say most people are addicted to meetings. It doesn't quite make sense, especially from a boss's perspective. Meetings are expensive. The hours your employees spend in meetings are hours when they're not working.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research reported that office workers spend an average of four hours per week in meetings. These same workers reported feeling like half of that time is wasted. Additionally, a Salary.com survey reported 47 percent of workers say meetings are the No. 1 time-waster at the office.

Obviously, not all meetings are unnecessary and unproductive. I spoke with project management and productivity expert Tony Wong to find out how to transform meetings and increase productivity. Here are his tips:

1. Timing matters.

Before you schedule your next meeting, ask yourself this: Do you really need 60 minutes to address the topic at hand? If you allot an entire hour for a meeting, your attendees will likely lengthen the meeting just for the sake of it.

Try reducing the length of your meetings to 30 minutes or less--10- and 15-minute meetings may even be all you need. To stay on schedule, always begin at the stated time, regardless of whether everyone has arrived, and end the meeting on time, even if you haven't completed your agenda.

2. Keep an eye on the size.

Inviting 10 people is similar to copying 10 people on an email. It's a sign of laziness. The more people you invite to your meeting, the more you sap productivity. Consider meetings VIP events--limit your invitations only to those whom are vital to the topic. As a rule, try for five people or less.

3. Choose a direction and stick with it.

There's nothing more annoying than meeting just to meet. Business meetings aren't effective when a decision needs to be made or for informational purposes. You can take care of that with a simple phone call or a company-wide email with a plea for no reply.

Unless it's a brainstorming session, a meeting should be called only to support and convey a previously made decision. A productive business meeting produces a committed plan of action. To stay on track, curb any irrelevant discussions, interruptions, and repeated points.

4. Define whether you're having a meeting or a work session.

The definition of a traditional business meeting has gotten lost over the years. This is likely how the long-winded meeting with unnecessary tasks came about. People easily confuse business meetings with group work sessions and brainstorming sessions. These two types of work settings require far more time than a standard meeting.

5. Ask attendees to come prepared.

This goes beyond putting together a brief agenda. Be sure all people are prepared in advance to work toward a concise plan of action--and have their materials and questions ready prior to entering the door.

6. Break bad habits.

Your bad habits are likely getting in the way of a quick and effective meeting. Be militant about accomplishing more at your meetings--break notoriously unproductive habits like long introductions and repetitive rambling. Even more challenging: Come to terms with the idea of turning down meetings that aren't vital to you or interrupt your deadlines. If you can't avoid the meeting altogether, set a time limit and leave accordingly.

The traditional business meeting just isn't working. Keep it short, concise, and when possible, eliminate it altogether.

Ilya Pozin founded his first company, Ciplex, at 17. The digital marketing and creative agency caters to small businesses and start-ups. @ilyaNeverSleeps