Our team feels an urge to clear our entire Issues List every week, which causes our Level 10 Meeting to blow past the 90-minute mark as we rush through ten items instead of solving the critical few. How do we break this habit and stay strictly on time?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The urge to clear the entire Issues List is a symptom of treating the Level 10 Meeting like an operational checklist rather than a strategic execution engine. When your team tries to knock out ten issues in sixty minutes, you end up discussing everything superficially and solving nothing permanently. That is how meetings drag past ninety minutes and the exact same operational problems resurface two weeks later.

To regain conversational discipline:

- Accept that your Issues List will never hit zero: A growing, healthy company constantly produces issues. An empty Issues List means your team is hiding problems or stagnant.
- Prioritize ruthlessly: Spend two minutes identifying the top three issues. Mark them 1, 2, and 3 based on overall company impact, not urgency or who speaks loudest.
- Tackle issue number one first: Do not touch issue two until issue one is fully identified, discussed, and solved with clear To-Dos. If solving issue one takes forty-five minutes, that is forty-five minutes well spent.
- Enforce the hard stop: When the ninety-minute mark arrives, stop. Conclude the meeting in the final five minutes, review the new To-Dos, and push unresolved issues to next week.

Solving two issues permanently each week will move your business forward faster than touching twelve issues and solving none.