Meetings: the great vortex that swallows most of our organizational lives. Is there anything – anything at all – we can do to make them negotiable?

Luckily there are several tactics available. But here let me focus on a particularly helpful nugget of wisdom from the negotiation literature: the deadline effect.

The deadline effect in negotiation essentially, and interestingly, shows that deadlines are not particularly detrimental to those who face them. But wait, don’t we all feel pressured when negotiating with our backs up against a hard stop? Yes, but so too does our counterpart. And that’s the essence of the deadline effect: deadlines focus everyone’s mind on business and can thus be quite beneficial to all negotiators concerned.

It’s not hard to see how the same principle might apply to meetings. We often have the latitude to schedule meetings at various points in the day. Should we schedule them in the middle of a big block of free time? Or should we schedule them right before another meeting? Should we schedule them for longer than needed, just in case, or even leave the timing open-ended? Or should we predetermine that they need to conclude by a specific time, and be quite specific with ourselves as well as the other parties involved about what the time is?

If you want to make meetings negotiable, leveraging the deadline effect is a good place to start: Consider scheduling your meetings right up against your other meetings, and be perfectly clear with yourself and your counterparts as to the existence of a firm deadline in the form of a subsequent meeting. Doing so might make you feel harried and could, potentially, make your long-winded colleagues feel rushed. But chances are it’ll make the bulk of your colleagues feel grateful, as they too will discover more minutes in the day.

In short, deadlines, in organizations, are your friend! Treat them that way, and even meetings can become negotiable.