Meetings

I hate meetings. Meetings are a pain. Meetings tend to waste time. In my opinion, most meetings are the least efficient method for sharing and disseminating information.

I had a number of meetings today and as I was waiting for at least half of them to start (late), I got to thinking about why you should avoid meetings at all costs.

I am not naive enough to think that you can do away with all meetings all together, but not everything requires a face to face. As our world moves more to distributed teams and electronic communication, we are all going to need to find better ways to share information. I understand that some meetings are very productive. I actually had three of them today that I left glad I attended.

Here is my top 10 list of why I think that meetings are bad. Now, not all may apply to all meetings. But, if your meetings incorporate even a few of these elements, you shouldn’t have them. continue reading...

It takes a really good meeting to be better than no meeting at all.

Blake Snow writes: continue reading...

If you're going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it's a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time. And it's probably more like 15 hours since there are mental switching costs associated with stopping what you're doing, going somewhere else to do something else, and then resuming what you were doing before.