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meetings, meetings, meetings

May 7, 2017 4 Comments

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I once heard Seth Godin give a talk to a group of marketers in London. After this session, someone asked his secret to being so productive. Seth not only publishes books and starts ventures, he famously finds the time to reply personally to every single email he receives.

Seth replied simply, “I don’t watch TV and I don’t go to meetings.”

That really resonated with me. I’ve worked in organizations where more than 75% of every calendar day was blocked with internal meetings.

Seth has written extensively on the soul-sapping plague of internal meetings. Here is one of his classic prescriptions on kicking the meeting habit:

    1. Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
    2. Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
    3. Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don’t, kick them out.
    4. Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I’m serious.
    5. If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.
    6. Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you’re done. Not your fault, it’s the timer’s.
    7. The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
    8. Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
    9. If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

Here’s a related cartoon I drew a few years ago on “The meeting after the meeting”.

Filed Under: management, meetings, most popular

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4 Comments

Join the Discussion
  1. Jennifer Kirkland says

    May 8, 2017 at 6:39 am

    So true lol Love it!

    Reply
  2. Mono says

    May 8, 2017 at 7:13 am

    Hm. Not really sure about this.
    A corporation is a living social organism, where relationships are as important for the overall performance as the actual tasks at hand.

    Also, some meetings are about ideation, thinking aloud, sharing opinions freely. Actually, from my experience, these are the meetings where the strategical decisions are formed.

    Reply
  3. Roger M says

    May 8, 2017 at 7:37 am

    Amen on the meeting discussions They Are a BIG WASTE OF TIME

    Reply
  4. Riccardo says

    December 17, 2018 at 8:38 am

    “Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you’re done. Not your fault, it’s the timer’s.”

    This is what they do at the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting) at the “lightening talks” (15 minutes talks). When you begin they set an egg timer at 15 minutes, when it goes off, you’re done. It does not matter where you are in your talk, you’re done. You’re just midway? Too bad…

    Not even a speaker goes beyond the allotted time…

    Reply

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