The most annoying work routine is MEETING!
If these meetings are just meetups, with music, food and beer, everybody chating technique details. That would be amazing, nevertheless, that can never be real.
First, let’s see why meetings are Bad?
To have a meeting, you need two stuff:
- People
- Time
Let’s say we will have 8 people join a meeing for an hour, what will happen? It cost infact 8 hours. Even we only have 2 meetings per week, it require 16 hours in total. And the truth is, usually there are far more than 2 meetings. Guess what can we achive in 16 hours? it’s 2 days!
Ofcourse, You may say, a beard well lathered is half shaved. It’s neccessary to do it. Yes, I agree, we have that need some times. But what really happen in meeting is, we can’t make sure everyone always focus on the same topics, the more people join, the more difficult to make sure everyone accept same information as we want them to understand.
In my experience, always some people won’t really get what you said, and they just boring and wanna finish the meeting ASAP, so they won’t bother to ask any question. This means you need much more time to follow up, the work never done when meeting finished.
Refactor Meeting
Just like doing code refactor, we want to extract the common code. We can do that for meetings too. Do you really need Everyone to join a meeting? Does everyone intrest on all the topics? Do they really need sit there from the beginning to the end ? Think it clear before you ask people to join.
It’s the best, we can finish the general topic first, and then ask uncorrelated people leave. In some cases, I do have bussiness with a topic, but I don’t need join discussion, only need the result or we say interface, how it achieved not important at all. I should be ok to leave as ealier as possible.
Less people make meeting better.
You may say, what about brain storming? that need everyone to participate in. Really? brain storing infact doesn’t say we must sit in the same room at the same time.
Does a timer help stimulating imagination and creativity? Noooooo ~ Never. Imagination and creativitis are random collisions. You can never control them. Some one may prefer thinking by interact with others, but some one may enjoying to be quiet and alone.
Want to come out some kind of idea from a time fixed meeting, it’s wrong from the beginning. You never get a idea, but some scrub solutions.
No meeting makes work better.
Do we really need meeting? that’s not sure infact.
Everyone is different, different persona lity and different working style. Asking everyone to working in the same way is impossible, not to mention they have to deliver their best at the same time and juding people by the performance in meeting is even more stupid.
So if you just want to announce or demo some thing, can it be a writeup or a video instead? people will not only be able to check that information when they feel ok, they can also read or watch again and again. You just need a feedback message to make sure message delivered.
And when 2 or 3 people need have a discussion, why bothring book meeting rooms and cheduling in calendar. We can just talk, it’s much much more easier to find free time when less people and compromise a conclusion. Just as the mentioned above, if you really want to achieve same understanding, we always need one to one person conmulication. So why can’t we skip meeting, direcly work on that immediately. Ofcourse, it’s a huge communication work, but who says manage is a easy job …
Escape Meetings
Escape doesn’t mean we get rid of it. But we need transform it to a more effective and high quality way.
If we can’t held meetings better, not only they are inefficient Operations, but also continue disturbing daily work, reduce work satisfaction. And not mention, when you need supporting TELEWORK!
To escape meetings, can you ?