Meetings deserve a friction audit of their own.

Ask:

Does this meeting require discussion?

Does everyone need to attend?

Could the information be shared another way?

Could it be 20 minutes instead of an hour?

Could it happen monthly instead of weekly?

Chambers run on relationships, so meetings certainly matter. But there is no virtue in spending 60 minutes discussing something that required a four-line email.

Some work doesn’t need to be improved, automated, delegated, or templated. It needs to disappear.

It’s the report nobody reads.

Or an event that takes enormous staff time and produces little member participation.

It’s consistently maintaining a communication channel that gets almost no engagement.

Or manually producing something that members stopped caring about years ago.

Ask yourself:

“If we stopped doing this tomorrow, what would happen?”

If the answer is “probably nothing,” congratulations. You just uncovered some free time.

At the end of your one-week audit, don’t try to fix everything.

Choose three items.

For each one, decide whether you can:

• Eliminate it
• Automate it
• Delegate it
• Template it
• Document it
• Simplify it

Then make a change.

You’re looking for small pieces of unnecessary work that have quietly attached themselves to your day.

Remove three this month.

Then do the audit again a few months from now.

You may not magically discover an extra eight hours in your week. But you might find 20 minutes here, 15 minutes there, and one irritating task you never have to do again.

For a busy chamber pro, that’s a pretty good return.