Before organising any meeting, ask yourself a simple question: do we really need to meet? Can we deal with the issue by e-mail, Instant Message or on the telephone/Skye?
1. Activity vs results.
Meetings eat up resources, are often unproductive and frequently confuse activity (we have met) with effectiveness (we got a result we could not have achieved in any other way) and/or efficiency (meeting was the best way of addressing the issue).
2. Meetings are Disruptive.
They break into your natural workflow. For example, you start work at 08.30, just get into a productive rhythm and then have to leave what you are doing to go to the 09.30 meeting. The meeting drags on and you finally get away at 11.30. You get back to the office and find several messages you need to deal with. By the time you’ve addressed them all, you need lunch.
You sit down to work again at 13.45 and take 15 minutes or so to get back into the rhythm. Things are just starting to flow again when you need to stop everything to go to a meeting at 15.00. The meeting takes 90 minutes; by the time you get back to the office, tired and frustrated from the meetings, you realise you ought to work for another 3 or 4 hours in order to keep the project on it’s timeline.
What really annoys you is that the two meetings could have been avoided if the main parties involved had communicated with each other from the start rather than allowing problems to build up and even then, they could have dealt with the issues by e-mail rather than using a meeting to posture and play the blame game.
3. Meetings are Easily Side-Tracked.
Most meetings are allowed to go off-topic and/or are dominated by someone who likes the sound of his/her own voice. If you have to have a meeting, make sure that the agenda is explicit about the decisions to be made and are chaired firmly and fairly.
4. Meetings Require Preparation.
In order for meeting to be successful, people need to prepare. Often, because they are chasing their tales, people try to wing it, thinking on their feet. This wastes time which is often exacerbated by a vague agenda. As I wrote above, make sue that agenda items give a clear description of the area to be discussed and the decision needed.
5. Meetings Often Start Late.
How often do meetings start on time? Unless the chairperson is firm and ensures meeting start on time, creep sets in and meetings start later and later. Indeed, in some organisations, people turn up late knowing the meeting won’t have started on time. This becomes a self-reinforcing problem and what is worse, it has a knock-on effect on participant’s time management for the rest of the day.
Conclusion.
Before calling a meeting, or attending one, the route to better time management and greater productivity means asking yourself if you really need to have the meeting or whether the issue can be dealt with in another way.
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