Are meetings a waste of time? Craig Newmark mentioned once that his 20 or so staffers did more and were productive than your usual lot of 20 because they did not waste time in meetings. I agree to a large extent. My old boss would have excruciatingly long and painful meetings every morning in some weak attempt to exert control. Meetings would start at 9:45am; the first painfest would drag out until 10:30am, then “mgmt” would stay back for a nauseating match of nonsense until 11:30am…
By the time you got out and asked yourself how you would ever get back that time… the day was half done. Mind you that was a company of 10 or so.
Yahoo! is a company of 10,000 and they are 1,00x worst, literally and figuratively.
We’ve been able to keep meetings to a minimum, but our company is growing, rapidly… so this begs the question, how can I maintain an efficient management system? Something I need to think of, defo.
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April 23rd, 2008 at 3:14 pm
1. Create an agenda for every meeting and stick to it.
2. Schedule meetings in 15 minute increments - anything that requires more conversation can happen in a break out session later.
3. Never leave a meeting without action items to follow up on and a person assigned to the item whose responsibility it is to follow up on the item.
4. Think about making meetings “standing meetings” - if everyone’s standing up - even around a whiteboard, meetings go much faster.
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Meetings CAN actually save time because they get everyone together and, hopefully, on the same page. But I agree that they can be intensely timewasting. Back when I worked for a computer vendor, I think the worst offenders were all the weekly meetings that you had whether there was a good reason to have them or not.