All Meetings Are A Vain Waste Of Time - No Exceptions!

[Deleted50669]

meetings can be amazing. I host a 5-15 minute meeting every day with my employees.
I know that is my chance to lay out policies and address issues. They know that is their chance to bring up anything that concerns them.

We also hold a 1 hour meeting each week to go over goals and milestones and discuss progress for the week.

After that no more meetings. People like to use meetings to escape shitty jobs and avoid boring work that doesn’t drive them. Shitty, inefficient meetings are a symptom of a bigger issue in the organization.

Never thought about that last part... really good point.

 

[RazorCut]

Totally 100 percent disagree.

Face-to-face meetings, in my experience, have provided 10x the opportunity of a phone call.

I think it depends on the purpose of the meetings. Your face to faces are probably all about building contacts and creating revenue. In that case flying 1/2 way around the world would be worth the trouble if the contacts made are valuable enough.

Compare that with inter-department meetings discussing the minutia of this and that which are generally a total waste of time and effort.

The title probably doesn't help:

All Meetings Are A Vain Waste Of Time - No Exceptions!

There are Apples and there are Oranges.

 

[ZF Lee]

Totally 100 percent disagree.

Face-to-face meetings, in my experience, have provided 10x the opportunity of a phone call.

Just like an Internet forum, a meeting can only be good as its people.

One of the longest meetings that I ever went to was in high school.

I was a school librarian at that time.

The folks made the mistake of selecting too many student librarians.
Now we had kids who just went there to hang out with friends, instead of performing duties
such as organizing books or dusting shelves.

Needless to say, 90% of the time was spent picking on faults and scolding.

Another of the longest meetings I went to was with an entrepreneur meetup.
It was around 4 hours-lasting from 7pm until midnight.

Great folks.
Many brilliant minds, with sound experience, rationale and transparency.

We examined many things we could improve in our lives such as business models, health and products.
Instead of pointing out mistakes and blaming, they gave tons of suggestions, shared their add-ons and offered tips and referrals.


I dunno why they haven't held another meetup again. Would go again.

On another note, I highly recommend Masterson's style of obtaining feedback from a team to improve copy, as detailed in his book Copy Logic. It's mostly for agency copywriters in teams, but this method can work elsewhere. I noticed some of my most productive meetings mirroring his stuff although I didn't know about it until last year.

 

[Ernman]

First of all, I try to avoid making declarative statements such as, "I'm never doing such and such again." That usually leads to me eating my words down the road.

But the rant is completely understandable. With today's vast array of communication tools, many meetings are a waste of time. Some do serve a purpose, IF AND ONLY IF, the organizer understands why they must have a face to face, plans for an efficient exchange of information, brings the right people to the table and properly executes the meeting. I love the short "stand ups" mentioned in earlier posts. People tend to pontificate if they are comfortably sitting around a table, coffee or tea at hand in their fancy mug. Make them stand up and OMG they can't wait to get done and move on. There's also something to be said for observing body language, which is much harder to do in remote settings.

As with so many things - everything in balance and for purpose.

 

[nyc217]

Bored? Lonely? Simply can't be bothered to work? Why not hold a meeting?! It will make you seem busy and feel important, whilst achieving absolutely nothing whatsoever! Hooray!​

Arrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!! I'm so angry right now, I knew it, I told him as much. Why do you want me there?

What will we discuss?

What's the end goal of this meeting?

It's important that you're there!

You need to meet the team!

There's a lot of money on the table!

Seriously, I am never, and I mean NEVER, going to another meeting as long as I live, unless I'm being paid to be there, or it's with the Queen or something, and even then...

I've just wasted over four hours of my life, travelling to, sitting in, and returning from a meeting that could have been summed up in either five emails, or a five minute phone call.

The only good that has come from this, is that I now have that policy in place...

Hey Roli, can we have a meeting about XYZ?

Is there anything about XYZ that cannot be summed up in five back 'n' forth emails, or a five minute phone call?

Erm, I guess not.

Great, well let's do that instead then!

Has there ever been a productive meeting in the history of meetings? Is there ANY reason to EVER have a meeting?

If so, please, pretty please with dainty little cherries on top, enlighten me.

- rant just about over :-(

LOL

I truly laughed while reading through this thread because I am in the thick of it right now. I actually had my TRUE FTE two weeks ago because of this; that's how much I freaking hate them. But that being said, I have a love-hate relationship w/ meetings since they motivate me to GTFO.

Long story short, I clocked over 15 hours of meetings w/in a 40 hour work week at my job where I am a software developer. I remember, it was a Wednesday and had over 6 meetings in one day. That's close to 6 hours of meetings for that day!

The worse part about that is, all of those meetings could have been easily handled via email, within 2 or 3 email exchanges at most, and there were zero takeaways for improving productivity or more importantly delivering real value to our customer.

Granted there are instances where meetings are important; however, the vast majority just create massive frustrations for me.

Glad I am not the only one!

 

[deepestblue]

The board of directors were mostly business owners who made their own schedules. I'd sit there in the meetings imagining I had time freedom like them. It helped tremendously in retrospect. They gave something to aim for.