We struggle to keep our Level 10 Meeting under ninety minutes because we have a massive, ever-growing Issues List that we feel we must tackle every week. How do we manage our Issues List so we only focus on what truly matters?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A massive, ever-growing Issues List is a common cause of weekly meeting bloat. When your list is dozens of items long, the sheer volume creates cognitive fatigue, and your team will struggle to stay under the ninety-minute limit for the Level 10 Meeting™.

To manage this, you must learn the difference between a short-term issue and a long-term issue. Your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ is designed to solve immediate, short-term issues that are holding the team back this week or this month. Long-term issues, such as new product ideas or long-term structural changes, do not belong on your weekly list. They belong on your V/TO® under the long-term Issues List, which you only review during your quarterly planning sessions.

Every week, actively prune the list. Move anything that can wait until the next quarter off the weekly board.

For the short-term issues that remain, do not try to solve them in chronological order. Spend the first few minutes of the IDS® portion prioritizing. Select only the top three most critical issues. Once you solve those three, if you have time left, select the next three. If you do not get to the rest, they simply roll over to next week. Accepting that you will not solve every issue every week is key to keeping your meeting focused and under ninety minutes.