Let’s Talk About Meetings

Meetings how about you and I talk. Why are there so many of you, why do they so often turn into present and inform sessions when they should be plan and decide. Why is it so easy to schedule one of you, 30 seconds of work and an hour of 5 people’s time is gone like that. Their productivity for the afternoon too is shot.

My new plan for meetings is pretty simple:

1. Monday: Management, departmental and office/company wide meetings
2. Tuesday: Client and vendor meetings
3. Wednesday: Project meetings
4. Thursday: Different client and vendor meetings than Tuesday
5. Friday: no meetings of any sort, no matter what

That’s it no meetings outside of this schedule if you need to talk about something, wait a week, plan your future meetings better, discuss more over email or Basecamp or something, stop killing my productivity by having meetings.

Exceptions: informal discussions (hey let’s talk about what x looks like for 5 minutes) sure go ahead and have them whenever and wherever, formal/private meetings (firings/company closing/discipline) again do those as needed, everything else don’t do it. If you find yourself emailing a group of people and finding a time and place to discuss something it’s a meeting – pick the right day and wait till then.

The two biggest creators of useless meetings, presenting information when it could be more accurately and economically done in another fashion (video/email/phone/etc) and having people there who aren’t part of the core discussion.

Meetings in the word of Stephen Colbert “You’re on notice!”