I hate long, unnecessary meetings. I've come to realize that I have developed some personal rules for calling meetings and whenever I can, try to make meetings that I attend adhere to these rules. They're pretty simple.
1. No more than an hour
2. Have an agenda
3. Any long, hypothetical discussions or tangents get cut off with a note to return at a later date when you've given it more thought
4. Only necessary people attending
The Hour
There's a chance that it might just be adult ADD, but I've come to learn that my attention span for meeting is somewhere around an hour. Longer if we're actually being productive, shorter if I'm just listening to someone yammer on about something that I don't care about, but somewhere around the hour mark I start yawning, sliding down in my chair and mentally making grocery lists. Realistically, most meetings can be resolved in about 20 minutes, so I'm being generous with an hour.
The Agenda
Even if it's just a mental agenda, there should be an itemized list of things to cover to make sure that you don't forget anything and no random topics are slipped in there to waste everyone's time. Coming up with an agenda also helps you to realize that maybe in fact you don't need a meeting and you could just amble on over to someone else's desk and ask 3 simple questions.
Please stop talking
Discussions that go around in circles about what is hypothetically the best way to accomplish something make me want to take a spoon and jam it into my eye. If you can't come to a resolution around a disagreement, realize when the conversation is going around in circles, stop it, make a note to go to your respective corners, dig up more information and revisit it later. Nothing wastes more time than crap like this.
Do I really need to be here?
When I was first out of school, I wanted to be in every meeting that I possibly could, just so that I could know every small bit of information or be a part of every discussion to do with the company. There definitely comes a point where you realize that this is incredibly dumb and a huge waste of your time. Sure, it feels all fun and important to blow people off and say "sorry, I've got to run into a meeting", but that will quickly get old. Realizing when you have nothing valuable to contribute will ultimately make you more productive.
There, now go piss off your colleagues with my incredibly profound insights.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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4 comments:
WOW!...I love reading about career neophytes...LOL!!
Well geez, you're so old. Some of us are still learning.
...learning that I have ADD
Another technique that works well is to adopt the policy that some companies have: it is forbidden to sit down during a meeting.
If you have this one rule, oddly enough no other rules seem to be required!
Plus even ADD people like you can remember it :->
That's a fantastic rule. We have daily morning meetings to sync up on different projects that we call "stand ups" because they're not supposed to be long enough that you want to sit down. Love it.
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