Am I in a Meeting, or am I in Hell?
- Posted by Jim Tobin on September 19th, 2007
filed in The Business of Advertising |
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Meetings suck. How many times have you felt like your entire day was hijacked, taken over by other people’s mysterious random agendas? Of course, meeting have their good side. We are social animals, and communicate best face to face. So much more is accomplished when we actually can see the people with whom we are communicating. So, why then do meetings feel like torture sometimes?
Without rules and structure, meetings, just like children, can get out of hand and turn into ugly, annoying monsters. Never allow a meeting to take place without publishing:
The purpose
An agenda
Start time and end time
And here is my pet peeve, the non-sacred start time. Five people waiting ten minutes for the sixth person to show up is a waste of nearly an hour of productivity. It is cruel to add onto everyone’s already long day by disrespecting the start time of a meeting. Make it a policy to start and end on time. Latecomers can catch up. Last one in the room is elected the note taker!
So, with just a little forethought and sticking to some simple and basic rules you can tame the meeting monster. Hell, you might just start enjoying meetings! (I think the guy in the red hat is actually having a good time…)