Meetings that don’t suck

I work for the Federal government and I spend a LOT of time in meetings. I’m tempted to replace the “and” in that sentence with “therefore,” but I had just as many meetings when I was part of big industry, too.

Meetings can be frustrating and often have a pretty low productivity-per-minute, but the answer is not to go off the pundit deep end and avoid them altogether. Many useful, and most big, things are accomplished by teams of people, and occassionally these teams need to get together to coordinate.

So, we can’t (and shouldn’t) avoid all meetings, but we can surely go a long way toward making the meetings we do have more productive.

Check out this post by Alex over at the Chief Happiness Officer blog. He outlines five useful and slightly weird (which is good) tips for making over your meetings.

Time spent in meetings is constantly increasing. Bad meetings suck the life force out of people, leaving them tired and unhappy at work. Bad meetings also lead to bad decisions, reduced motivation and conflicts.

If we really want fun, positive meetings, where all participants can speak their mind, where new ideas are generated and developed and where the time is used as efficiently as possible, we need to go beyond the usual advice and try something slightly weird. This blogpost presents some ways you can do that.

My favorite tip (and one that I already practice): interrupt the meeting regularly. Long meetings need regular bio breaks, and even short meetings need creativity breaks when you interrupt the drone with something other than meeting business.