Meetings
My Totally Rational Hate of Meetings
Tomorrow I have a meeting.
I still haven’t really planned it apart from a load of pizzas arriving 15 minutes into it.
The old saying “that meeting could have been an e-mail” is my mantra but sometimes, rarely but sometimes, a meeting is needed. Our company isn’t large but it’s large enough for everyone to lose track of what anyone else is doing.
As we are a distributed company we can go days, weeks or even months without seeing each other. I do my best as nominal boss of two of the three companies to see people on a regular basis but as I have to make more visits to the UK now and have family responsibilities at home regularly, sometimes contact is limited to our Whatsapp group and we just deal with it.
Since Covid (when admittedly we were a much smaller team of just 4 or 5) we have had four full meetings: Two Xmas meals (Not really meetings), a full meeting in November last year and erm… this one tomorrow.
So what I need to avoid is “that meeting could have been an e-mail” of course but without making it too much so we can’t take anything in.
I have a sort of agenda for the meeting, bullet points I want to talk about but I haven’t written a presentation, done a powerpoint or prepared any sort of video… maybe I should. It’s difficult to keep people’s attention these days so I think the basic rules for meetings should be as follows:
Phone notifications off and phones upside down
Pizzas and lots of them
Drinks
Present the bullet points verbally
Chat
No notes
Therefore I may have to actually get planning this thing right?
Oh gawd! Just realised, the pizzas may take away focus... and the drinks
Nothing more today… you might be able to guess why.
Last thing in that very substacky way…
Do you hate meetings too?
Do you ever have useful meetings?
And if you do then how on Earth do you design a meeting that is useful for everyone (except as a social occasion when you have a distributed company).