What to do in the five minutes before a meeting

Five minutes is enough to walk into a meeting ready instead of flustered. Stop at a clean point in what you were doing, read the invite and the agenda, open the documents and the call link, get some water, stand up and stretch, take one slow breath, and close whatever will distract you. Then join a minute early.

The catch is that most reminders arrive at the start time, when those five minutes are already gone. Below is the routine minute by minute, and the reason a nudge 3 to 10 minutes ahead works better than one on the dot.

Why the five minutes matter

Moving from focused work into a meeting takes longer than it looks. Your head is still in the spreadsheet or the paragraph you left, and for the first few minutes of the call you are half there. Researchers who study task switching describe something similar: part of your attention stays with the unfinished task after you have moved on.

Then there are the practical losses. Hunting for the call link, finding the right document while everyone waits, discovering that your headphones are in the other room. None of it is a disaster. Together they mean the meeting starts without you, even when you are technically on time.

A few calm minutes fix most of this, and they cost less than the scramble does.

The five-minute routine

The minutes are a guide, not a stopwatch. On a busy day, do the first three steps and the breath.

Minute five: stop at a stopping point

Finish the sentence, not the section. Save your work and write one line about where you were and what comes next, at the top of the document or on a sticky note. It is much easier to leave a task when you know exactly how you will pick it up, and you will be less tempted to keep thinking about it during the meeting.

Minute four: read the invite

Open the event in Calendar and read it properly. Who is coming, what is on the agenda, and what is your part? Decide one thing you want to get out of the meeting: a decision, an answer, a next step. If there is no agenda, that one thing is your agenda.

Minute three: open what you need, close the rest

Open the documents, the slides and the call link. Then clear the screen:

• Press Command-Option-H to hide all the other apps and keep only the one you are in.
• Turn on Do Not Disturb or a work Focus from Control Center in the menu bar, so banners don't slide in while you talk or share your screen.
• If you will share your screen, close private tabs and anything you would rather colleagues didn't see.

For a meeting in a room, this is the minute to pick up your laptop, charger and notes and start walking.

Minute two: water and your body

Refill your glass and bring it with you. Go to the bathroom now if you will need to, because a long call is harder to leave. Stand up, roll your shoulders back and down a few times, and look out of a window or across the room for a few seconds to give your eyes a rest before another stretch at the screen.

Minute one: one slow breath, then join

Sit down, put your feet flat and take one or two slow breaths, breathing out for longer than you breathe in. If you are nervous about the meeting, box breathing is a simple pattern to follow for a minute. Then join. Joining a minute early gives you time to check your camera and microphone without anyone waiting, and lets you say hello before the agenda starts.

Why a reminder 3 to 10 minutes before beats one at the start

Calendar reminders are often set to the start time, or to whatever the person who sent the invite chose. Both have problems.

• At the start time, you are already late for the routine. The best you can do is grab the link and go, still thinking about whatever you left.
• Too early, and you go back to work. A reminder 30 minutes ahead is easy to dismiss with "plenty of time". Then you sink back into the task and miss the meeting anyway.
• A few minutes ahead is the sweet spot. Three to ten minutes is long enough to wrap up and prepare, and short enough that you won't start something new in the meantime.

In Calendar you can give every event a default alert in Calendar > Settings > Alerts, for example 10 minutes before. Meeting reminders on a Mac covers setting that up, including how to make alerts stay on screen until you act on them.

The other problem is that a calendar banner looks like every other notification. When you are absorbed, it slides in and out of the corner of the screen and you barely register it.

A nudge from the notch

In Notchpals, this job belongs to the Schedule characters. If Ticky, Biscuit or Honey is in your crew and you have allowed calendar access, it comes out of the notch when the next event on your calendar is 3 to 10 minutes away, which is exactly the window the routine above needs. It reads only the start time, never the title, the people or the notes, and it skips all-day events, cancelled ones and invitations you have declined.

TickyEarly is safe! Early is good! Head over now and we'll both breathe!

A character at the top center of the screen is harder to miss than a banner in the corner. Meeting soon is also one of the few visits allowed during a Notchpals focus session, so a 50 minute session that runs up to a call won't swallow the warning.

The limits matter most on heavy meeting days. The crew never speaks while your microphone or camera is on, so if you are still in the previous call when the window opens, the nudge for the next one waits, and when one call runs straight into the next it may not come at all. It also holds back while a full screen app is in front, such as slides you are rehearsing in full screen, and once you have been away from the keyboard and mouse for a couple of minutes. For meetings you can't afford to miss, keep a Calendar alert as well.

When there are no five minutes

Back-to-back meetings leave no gap for any of this, and adding buffers is the longer-term fix. Meanwhile, a few things help:

• Do the prep earlier. Spend ten minutes at the start of the day reading the invites for every meeting, and note the one thing you want from each.
• Shorten meetings you run. Ending at 25 or 50 minutes past the hour gives everyone their five minutes back.
• Keep the one-minute version. Even between two calls you can refill your water, stand up and take one slow breath before you join the next one.

Most meetings go better when you arrive with a clear head and the right window open. Five minutes is not much to spend on that, as long as something tells you when they start.