Perhaps things are different at the top of the tower, but in my experience if your meetings are regularly longer than an hour I'd say you're doing it wrong, or you're holding a workshop and not a meeting.
Get the right people in the room, have a clear agenda and someone to lead the meeting if needed, and it's rare that more than an hour is needed. Often far less. At least in my world. My most productive meetings are around 15-20 minutes.
If you're holding a workshop then I agree, take breaks.
> Perhaps things are different at the top of the tower, but in my experience if your meetings are regularly longer than an hour I'd say you're doing it wrong, or you're holding a workshop and not a meeting.
What do you mean by "top of the tower"? If you refer to my position as software architect, that has nothing to do with it.
I worked at many companies and meeting length was ALWAYS a factor of the company culture not of my role.
Personally I schedule meeting that take 45 minutes max. Most of the time i schedule 25 minutes. The 5 minutes are so people have a break in their Outlook calendar.
In my former life as an employee managing teams and projects, I was infamous for having meeting scheduled for 30 minutes which ended in 20 with a plan of action as output.
Breaks are good when you're having half-day or all-day meetings. For example, when someone has travelled to the office and you're meeting all day.
For regular meetings with your normal office mates, if they're so long that you need to insert breaks then they should probably have been separate meetings.
Having everyone leave the meeting and then slowly meander back in always takes longer than it should. That 5 minute break can turn into 10, 15, or even 20 minutes as you try to track down the last person who wandered off and then got pulled into something else.
Just make the meetings concise enough to handle without a break. If you have more material, schedule a separate meeting for it.
Sometimes you need a workshop. Sometimes you need an hour meeting. But one of the beneficial effects of the pandemic I experienced is that there's now a lot more push for meetings to be 30 minutes by default--at least in my experience.
