Why I hate meetings (and what you can do to hate them less) - A Tuesday Note
This is not to say that I do not see the value of meetings. They do have a purpose and there are objectives that you can achieve only when you do meetings. The truth of the matter is that meetings are a necessary evil in any organization.
Here are the main reasons why I despise them and some tips on how to despise them less.
They are usually unnecessarily long - The default setting of the duration when you are setting up meetings in most email and calendar software is one hour. Most people setting up meetings think that one hour is just enough or sometimes it's not even enough. Look, you can thoroughly bathe two children in one hour. You can watch three nerd-gasmic TEDTalks in one hour. You can change all four tires of a car in one hour.
Tip: Do yourself and your participants a favor by setting your default meeting duration to fifteen minutes. The key to punching all agenda items in a short span of time is to prepare a meeting overview and send it to everyone early on. However, it is not an assurance that the participants will actually read it and prepare prior to the meeting. If this is the case, you have a bigger problem.
Time spent on meetings is not spent on doing work - There is practically no work done in meetings. You talk, you discuss, you argue, you agree (or pretend to agree) but no actual product is made. Sure, they are still important because you may not be able to create a product without, say, setting a direction and to do that, you need to have a meeting.
Tip: The point is that less meetings mean more work done. If you need to set a team's direction, call for a Planning & Forecasting meeting and try your best to make it your last. If you need to meet so you can thresh out lessons learned an a just-concluded project, go ahead. After that, move on and don't look back.
These are time-wasters - A 1-hour meeting with ten people involved is actually a 10-hour meeting. Simple arithmetic.
Tip: Don't invite people that don't need to be in that meeting. Better yet, if you just need something that does not require interactivity, send out an email, use an online forum system or a poll.
They become pissing matches when too many egos are in the meeting - This usually happens when a staff employee calls a meeting and there's a manager or two invited. Or a manager calls a meeting with other managers.
Tip: The lesser the number of mangers or executives in that meeting, the better. However, if you happen to be in this unfortunate situation, be better than the rest by taking notes, keep as silent as possible and promise yourself you will run better meetings.
Really, they are interruptions to your employees - Software developers, artists and engineers understand this: to get valuable work done you will need long stretches of uninterrupted productivity. It's like sex. You need to pace yourself in order to get to a very good climax and to do that, it takes some time. If you get interrupted, you start all over again.
Tip: Routine and regularity is the key. If you really need to have some facetime with your employees, set up regular meetings. That way, they know when it will happen and they can set their own schedules. When that is done, they can be sure that they can work long hours on the next Facebook.
I have another piece about meetings and how to make them as short as possible. Read it here.
Now go and do the world a favor by running better meetings. Or better yet, cancel some of them.
