A Shorter Slot, A Wider Week: Trialling 25-Minute Meetings in a Small UK Firm

As we settle into November 2026, plenty of small UK firms are staring at diaries that look fuller than the work itself. The culprit is rarely a single bad meeting. It is the default: a 60-minute block, booked because that is what the calendar offers, not because the conversation needs it. Project 168 is built on the idea that a week is 168 hours and every one of them is a choice. So here is a small, practical choice for the final stretch of the year: run a one-month trial where internal meetings default to 25 minutes.

This is not an anti-meeting crusade. Meetings are how small teams make decisions, share context and stop email threads turning into novels. But the hour-long default is often a container with too much air in it. A 25-minute ceiling forces a useful question before anyone books a room: what are we actually deciding?

Why 25 minutes, and not 30?

Thirty minutes is sensible. Twenty-five is a nudge. It is long enough for a proper check-in, a client update or a decision with three options on the table, but short enough that people arrive with a point. The odd number also signals that this is a deliberate slot, not a truncated hour. Park a five-minute buffer after it and the meeting still fits neatly inside a half-hour block.

The bigger benefit is behavioural. When people know they have 25 minutes, they tend to prepare. When they know they have 60, they tend to warm up for 15. That is not laziness; it is Parkinson’s law with a Teams link.

Do the maths before you move the diary

A meeting-cost calculation does not need to be forensic to be useful. For a small firm, a rough loaded hourly cost is enough: annual salary divided by something like 1,680 productive hours, plus a sensible allowance for employer costs. Then multiply by attendees and meeting length. Add prep time if the meeting regularly demands it.

Take a four-person internal meeting with an average loaded cost of £35 an hour. An hour costs about £140 in attendee time. At 25 minutes it costs roughly £58. That is £82 back before you count the prep that no longer expands to fill the slot. If that meeting runs weekly, the annual saving is not pocket money.

Across a whole diary, the number gets more interesting. Suppose a small firm has eight recurring internal meetings a week, each with four attendees, and each drops from 60 to 25 minutes. That is 35 minutes saved per attendee per meeting, or 4 hours 40 minutes per person across the week. In attendee-hours, it is 18 hours 40 minutes. You do not need a finance director to tell you that is a useful chunk of a 168-hour week.

The rules for the four-week trial

Keep it contained. This is an internal default, not a company-wide revolution. For one month, any new internal meeting is booked for 25 minutes unless the organiser can name why it needs longer. Recurring internal meetings are moved to 25 minutes for the trial. Client calls are reviewed separately, because relationships do not always fit a stopwatch.

Use a short agenda template in the invite. It can be as simple as:

• Decision needed: one sentence.
• Context: two or three bullets, sent beforehand.
• Options: what is actually on the table.
• Owner: who leaves with the next step.
• Deadline: when it happens.

If there is no decision, no discussion and no next step, cancel the meeting and send a written update. That is not a radical idea, but it is remarkable how often a 60-minute slot survives because nobody wants to be the person who questions it.

What happens to recurring check-ins

Weekly team check-ins are the easiest win. Most can become 25 minutes with a standing agenda: numbers, blockers, priorities, decisions. Status updates that only need to be read should be written in a shared note before the meeting. The meeting then becomes a short conversation about what the note cannot resolve.

Daily stand-ups should stay short anyway. Weekly planning can hold at 25 minutes. Monthly reviews may genuinely need 50. The point is not to squeeze everything; it is to stop using the same default for every kind of conversation.

Client calls need a lighter touch

Do not surprise a client by turning a scheduled hour into 25 minutes without explanation. Offer a clear choice: a 25-minute decision call for a specific question, or a 50-minute working session for something more involved. Most clients will appreciate the clarity. Some will still want the hour, and that is fine. The trial is about internal defaults, not imposing your diary philosophy on paying customers.

The meetings that genuinely need longer

Workshops, complex planning sessions, sensitive conversations and training need room. So book 50 minutes rather than 60, or 90 with a break. The rule is simple: if 25 minutes is not enough, name the reason and choose the next sensible length. What you are trying to kill is the automatic hour, not the long meeting itself.

Track the hours that come back

Keep a shared ledger with five columns: meeting, scheduled length, actual length, attendees, and decision or next step. At the end of each week, add up the attendee-hours reclaimed. Then decide where they go. If the time quietly refills with more meetings, you have not reclaimed anything; you have just changed the shape of the diary.

Some of those hours should go to deep work, some to training, some to leaving on time. A small firm does not need a productivity manifesto. It needs a credible answer to the question: what did we stop doing, and what did we start doing instead?

The snags worth expecting

Some meetings will overrun because the agenda was vague. Fix the agenda, not the clock. Some people will feel rushed at first. Give the trial four weeks before judging it. There will be technical faff at the start of virtual calls; ask people to join two minutes early. And expect at least one person to say, ‘But we have always booked an hour.’ That is precisely the point.

By the end of the month, review the ledger and make a decision. Keep 25 minutes as the internal default. Keep 50 for the meetings that earn it. Update the calendar settings and invite templates so the default sticks. Then revisit it quarterly, because diaries drift and old habits are patient.

A shorter slot will not fix a broken team or a chaotic week. But it will expose how much of the working week has been handed over to habit. In a 168-hour week, that is worth a look.