I just wanted to know how you feel about meetings. At my work I am on a new project. So far this week in 3 days we have had 4 meetings. Total time spent in the meetings has been about 7-8 hours. Tomorrow is another meeting for 1.5 hours.
Now meetings should serve a purpose, but in the 8 hours so far the same questions have gotten asked over and over again and we haven’t moved forward at all. We seem to have a meeting about the last meeting, and carry it on to the next meeting.
All this for a really honestly simple web project.
So the question is if you are involved in meetings, are they usually just a waste of your time or do you actually get things accomplished first shot?
I left a big international company that had tons of meetings. They’re the reason I got wireless internet and a cordless speakerphone. I’d schedule my lunch around the 3 hours of meetings I had in the afternoon and work a half day in the office, and a half day sitting by the pool with the cordless speakerphone and laptop. In the winter I’d play video games or shoot pool in the basement (they are also the reason I got a headset with a mute on the headset :)). Sometimes if several co-workers were on the same call we’d all go to my house and play polish horseshoes and drink beer while “in our meetings”.
You can almost always divide the amount of productive work done in a meeting by the number of people in that meeting. The more people, the less productive it is.
Now I work for a small private company and very rarely have meetings. In the rare meetings I have they’re for important things, not just layer upon layer of management trying to justify their existance. Fifth Third bank tried to pull me into a weekly hour long conference call to “discuss updates on an upcoming credit union ATM conversion”, and my boss told them I would be attending one, because we don’t believe in hour long conference calls where the same things get said over and over. I could answer questions via email if they had any. I love where I work now.
I’d say 90% of my meetings are always lunch meetings, lots gets discussed and ate. The other 10% is conference calls which typically end with lunch meetings.
When I have meetings with my friend / business partner, we do it over beer, dinner, or sometimes over IM. We make a ton of decisions on the fly. And we don’t have to constantly debate things. We both make decisions that are for the positive benefit of the business.
But I guess with my work, it all has to get funneled through our manager and he’s not up with the technology and trends, so toooo many questions are asked. By the time we move on a project, the window is closed or missed.
And these aren’t lunch meetings. It’s just some staff in a small “conference room” not amounting to things. I do prefer the vendor lunch meetings though. But those are few and far between. But they get a lot accomplished in 2 hours.
most meetings are a clusterfuck… because most people can’t or won’t make decisions and stand by them.
Best way I’ve found to have “productive” meetings is to take charge; and have ONE person in control of the meeting… preferably someone with balls enough to tell people when to shut up, to get back on-topic, and to finalize decisions and hold people to them.
Otherwise most run away into off-topic and bleed into other meetings and nothing gets done.
meetings generally point out how fucked up a business is. everybody gets together to discuss how bad everything is and what needs to be changed, but nothing ever changes.
It really depends. 2 meetings I have during the week which are the same meeting just biweekly is very productive since it is a conference call between Buffalo, Milan office, Singapore office, Brazil office, and Houston office, so it goes relatively smooth and a lot gets accomplished.
But then we have another biweekly meeting that is just a clusterfuck and a mess right now that we are going to have for the next 2 months :bloated:
I skip out on as many meetings as I possibly can at my office. They are all the same circle jerk that hurts my productivity more than nyspeed since I go back to my desk and am so disgusted that I do nothing.
I think meetings make management feel special that they have control over who is in the room.
Makes us think management is not in touch with the rest of the business.
