Meeting Time

Most of corporate America is enamored with the idea of meetings. “The more meetings the better”. “If I’m in a meeting I must be important”. “Why wasn’t I invited to that meeting?” It’s basically an extension of the cool kids in high school leaving out the less cool kids. Very little is actually ever accomplished in meetings, and if you’re like me (and who isn’t) you dread meetings (all of them). Status updates, WebEx meetings, strategy planning, the list goes on. You’d rather be at your desk wasting your time the way YOU want to. All that IS accomplished in meetings can be done by email and we all know it. But sometimes you have to plan meetings. I know this is contrary to what I just said, but unless you get a few “key” people in a room together, your goals will not get accomplished. Again, you could do this in an email, but some just don’t take it serious enough unless you have a face to face (<=shameless corporate buzzwords).


So, if you need to have one of these necessary evils you need to plan it at the appropriate time, which is…

11:30AM.

Why?

No meeting should take longer than a ½ hour. More than this and you’re either goofing off or you’re not prepared enough to have the meeting in the first place. Most meetings are controlled by someone bloviating about something unimportant, or simply talking louder to make it sound like they’re right. More often than not these people are fat and/or caffeine junkies . This is why 11:30 makes perfect sense. Fatties can’t go much past noon time before their glucose levels sink faster than Natalie Wood, and caffeine hounds will be crashing from their 3rd morning Cup-o-Joe by this time. Once these anchors start to drift off, say something…anything that will nip this meeting in the bud. Something like, “So, I think we all know what the next steps are”, or “this has been helpful. We should be all set.” Rarely will anyone contradict you. Fatties and Junkies will be zoning out, and most others don’t want to appear as if they missed the point of the entire meeting and simply retreat off to their respective corners.

And what was the point of that meeting? Nothing really. Just a place to say what needs to be said so everyone on the room hears it and carries on with what they were doing. So, next week when something doesn’t get accomplished, you can always say, “What happened!? We met about this last week!” It’s your insurance policy against others’ incompetence, but it doesn’t have to take hours to get it.