Schedule Shorter Appointments by Changing the Default Calendar Settings
Meetings can be notorious time wasters. To keep them short and to the point, change the default appointment duration on your office calendar.
Harvard Business Review discusses how the environment can influence behavior. They suggest that if you want to influence someone’s habits, you should analyze their environment and find ways to make “the desired actions easy and the unwanted difficult.” In the case of shorter appointments, they explain:
Organize an office calendaring program where the default meeting duration is 15 or 30 minutes, not an hour, and you need to change it to lengthen it if necessary. While people will still be scheduling several one-hour appointments, having to spend energy canceling the standard option will cut down on many of the items that end up on people’s schedules.
For example, in your Google calendar settings, you have the option to change the default event duration. They even offer a “quick meeting” option where meetings end five or ten minutes early. Of course, you may not have control over this, but if you do, then it’s worth a try. It would be helpful to tell your coworkers what you did, because it doesn’t necessarily involve manipulating their behavior, but simply creates a use case for shortening the default meeting times. Check out the full HBR post at the link below.