‘Let’s meet’ doesn’t have to be death knell for productivity

We’ve all been pulled into meetings where our only purpose seemed to be to warm a chair, and we’ve endured hour-long meetings still rambling at the two-hour mark. “Meetings are like a gas expanding to fill all available space,’’ quips Saul Kaplan, founder of Business Innovation Factory, a Rhode Island nonprofit.

So how do you hold meetings that accomplish something, without wasting participants’ time? I’ve been gathering advice from people who work hard to make meetings at their companies more productive. Here’s the top 12:

Focus on the basics. Larry Bohn’s advice could easily fit in a single Tweet. “Start with a stated goal. Have an agenda. Ruthlessly manage time and topics,’’ says Bohn, a venture capitalist at General Catalyst Partners in Cambridge. “Never hold a meeting without an agenda that has been prescreened by participants,’’ says Doug MacDougall, who runs a Wellesley public relations firm. Don’t be afraid to set aside issues that surface, but aren’t relevant to the meeting’s objective, says Kelley Lynn Kassa, director of marketing communications for Datawatch, a Chelmsford analytics software company.

Nix the chairs. A growing trend, intended to encourage succinct meetings, is to run them standing up. “This keeps people from filling time,’’ says Dharmesh Shah, chief technology officer at HubSpot, a Cambridge digital marketing firm. At Kayak, a travel site with a technology office in Concord, stand-up meetings often take place around the foosball table.

Start at an odd time. Sara Spalding, senior director of Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center, suggests 10 minutes after the hour. It cuts down on stragglers, and makes it easier to start on time, she says.

Limit the size. Resist temptation to invite everyone in your e-mail address book. “Smaller is often more effective,’’ says Andy Ory, chief executive of Acme Packet, a communications company in Bedford. “Don’t invite everyone who may possibly be interested in the topic.’’