As entrepreneurs, we know that effective communication is essential to leading teams, managing clients and growing our businesses. But what happens when the main tool we use for communication starts to make our work less effective and enjoyable?

According to Harvard Business Reviewmodern executives spend over 20 hours a week in meetings and 65% say meetings get in the way of their work.

For an entrepreneur, ineffective and unproductive meetings are at best a distraction – and at worst – detrimental to business growth. In fact, according to a STUDY from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, your satisfaction at your company is also negatively affected because meeting effectiveness is directly related to job satisfaction. Fortunately, there are some solutions to reclaim your time (and pleasure). Here are five strategies I've adopted to reduce my time spent in meetings each week.

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1. Apply the calendar rules

Calendar rules are a set of standards for managing your calendar. They help you, your team and your clients understand when you are available for meetings. Additionally, they are tools to help you avoid being “always on” for everyone's schedule. The simplest calendar rules show your work hours, when you're available for meetings, and when you'll be working on other things.

A few years ago, when I was struggling with my work-life balance, my Operations Manager and I created calendar rules for me as the CEO of our company. We write individual rules, adding things like “no more than three meetings a day” and “I only have outside meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” Next, we created a template of my typical weekly calendar that we could share while automatically programming it using our favorite calendar software.

For example, one of my calendar rules is that I have no appointments after 4:30pm, so I updated my calendar software to automatically reject appointments sent to me during off hours.

2. Have a progressive scale for evaluating your communication tool

Not all communication updates have to be meetings. We have opportunities to connect with our teams and clients. narrow the time you spend in meetings applying a progressive scale for determining the best way to communicate certain information. Start with nothing as a base, then work your way up to the commitment level from there.

For example, if some form of communication is required, consider asynchronous communication (direct message or email) followed by a phone call. From there, you can progress to a video call or in-person meeting. Adapt the needs of your communication vehicle to what you're sharing to optimize your time and team productivity.

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3. Shorten scheduled meeting times

Not every meeting has to be an hour. In fact, according to Parkinson's Law, work will expand to fit the allotted time … if you make an hour – or 12.5% ​​of the average working day – default to discussing issues. Automatically cut short all your appointments. If your default is one hour, set the default to 30 to 45 minutes instead. However, if your default is 30 minutes, consider shortening regular meetings to 15-20 minutes.

If you need additional help implementing this rule, I use Google Calendar for our company to automate this process in my calendar. There is a setting called “speed dating” that you can turn on to shorten the default duration of your appointment times.

4. Adopt a more productive meeting pattern

A major beef entrepreneur with dating is their ineffectiveness. Part of this ineffectiveness is because meetings are not properly planned or led. I overcome this by always having a designated meeting moderator who runs each meeting one at a time agendaand having clear meeting outcomes and next steps.

The strategic framework process we use for this is called an IPO meeting structure; this includes input, process and output. The login section allows our team to pre-plan and compile any files needed for the meeting ahead of time. With this strategy, we don't waste time looking for important things during the actual meeting. The process section is the agenda or topics for discussion. We usually describe this section and take notes in a common document for each section of the “process” agenda. The results section takes place during each meeting and includes each side's next steps and tasks.

5. Use technology to improve communication

Planning and intentionality are the best tools to limit the time we spend in meetings each week. Thankfully, with technology, we can scale that planning and purpose to work for us even when we're not actively thinking about maintaining our ideal work schedule. Some tools I use in my business are:

Lazy (or another intra-office communication system): What I love about Slack is that I can quickly check in and answer questions from my team without the need for meetings. Additionally, Slack provides a searchable company-wide record of project history. One thing to remember with Slack, as with any communication system, is that it can be a distraction if you let it. I encourage you to create some standard operating procedures for how you use the system.

Instead of always being on Slack all day and allowing yourself to be interrupted and distracted, make a rule that you only check Slack three to five times a day. For emergencies or time-sensitive items, tell your team to call you.

Audio or video notes: Sometimes details are lost when sending text messages. To avoid this, I recommend using audio or video notes for your team; especially if you send specific instructions or feedback. The benefit of a video or phone call is that you can easily transmit information with your voice and/or by sharing your screen, but this is not limited to meetings. Sending asynchronous voice or video messages still allow you to give specific instructions without scheduling a meeting. Software like Slack, Loom or even text messaging allow you to do this.

Common project notes: When I started building my agency virtual team A few years ago, we implemented a practice of using a shared meeting notes document per client to capture and track our project history.

These shared meeting notes have evolved as an efficient way for team members who cannot attend meetings to capture what happened. This also works for generating automatic appointment summaries for clients. These summaries allow clients to easily track project updates and have a clear record of their next steps and deliverables for the project, which inevitably makes our next meeting with them more productive.

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As an entrepreneur, you owe it to yourself to adopt modern tools to prevent ineffective meetings from ruining your progress. Whether it's adopting calendar rules to inform when and what you're working on, using a progressive scale for evaluating communication tools, shortening your default meeting times, using a more productive meeting template, or using technology to improved communications, each of these is a tool. you can use it to spend less time dating and more time building your empire.