Hard Stops, Soft Stops: meeting participation with entry and exit strategies

Do you ever have a colleague come by to invite you to a last-minute steering committee meeting on the new project? Sounds something like this. “Hey, Steve, we’re going through the action plans and key milestones - we could sure use your help to see if we have the deliverables suitably aligned to the project. We’re in Conference Room B12 at 10:00. See you there? Should only take about an hour.”

Now, that request for participation might stroke your ego, it might even make you feel worthwhile and important. It is also an unplanned meeting. The problem is that you never really know how long the project review could take. You might be in there until noon, or longer - with your mind racing about all the things you could have been doing instead of being in this meeting. Not only that, you might even have new tasks with your name next to them, and that means more to do in this over-charged world.

Here are two ways to allay this.

The Hard Stop. What this means is that you pre-announce an ending time to your participation. A hard stop literally means that at a certain pre-announced time, your participation ends. So that sounds like this. “Sure, Steve I’d love to participate and could give you 20 minutes of my time. At 10:30 I’d need to leave and go see Maria. Just so you are OK with that. Deal?”

You could even use the words “hard stop” though in the wrong circumstances, that might sound like business jargon gone bad – up to you. In that case, you might also have to educate people on what it means. “Sure, Steve, I’d love to participate and could give you 20 minutes of my time. I have a hard stop at 10:30 which means I’d need to leave and go see Maria. Just so you are OK with that. Deal?”

The Soft Stop. A soft stop means that you will have to get up and go ‘at about a certain time’. It’s commitment with an open-ended departure. Sounds like this: “Sure, Steve, I’d love to participate and could give you some of my time. Just so you know, about 10:30 Maria will pop in and get me for another meeting.” Or it could sound like this: “Sure, I’d love to participant and can do so until my client calls me to discuss the proposal. After that I need to get up and address their concerns.”

The benefit of the hard or soft stops is that they keep you in the driver’s seat of your time, your day and your activities. Try it out and leave your comments.