Can a crazy meeting schedule be productive? 

This is the peak season for our business as we ramp up for the busy holiday period, so it is meetings, meetings and some more meetings.

And just when you think you have some space to get something done, some idiot calls for another meeting.

This can’t be good. It is not intelligent on so many fronts, but who is taking the time to think this through?

The volume of meetings. The frequency of meetings. The attendees. The time and space between meetings. The purpose for the meetings… everything. Every. Frigging. Part. Of. It. Needs. To. Be. Reviewed.

(This is what flows through my head as my inner voice, for once in its life, makes sense in its negative protestations)

Just take the idea of the one-hour meeting as an example. People scheduling one-hour meetings back to back with no break in between is the epitome of dumb. The one-hour meeting is a layover from the old paper-based calendars. In this modern world, we should be thinking differently. Some things need to be brought into the digital age. The daft thing is that the technology we use to have meetings these days now that we are forced to be remote with our connections is very advanced. We can see each other from one corner of the earth to the other… in real-time. But what do we do? We schedule one-hour meetings. Really. Come on. We are better than this. We. Are.

If we engaged in an open conversation with some common sense, we could get what we needed to get done in forty minutes. That would allow people to move in between meetings/rooms and allow for clarity of actions. I am more and more convinced that productivity would go UP.

In fact, if we went all in and engaged our common sense, we could fully reformat the meeting structure in many a business. In doing so, there would be fantastic productivity gains.

But the enormous resistance to any proposal of the meeting arrangements in any organisation is the idea of engaging ‘common sense’. 

But, and here is the kicker, the one thing I have always found in my thirty-five years of working is that common sense is not very common. 

That, and the fact that people are not prepared to give up their power or their little fiefdoms…

and that is because most people with power crave an audience and always need to have their assumed authority on show…

and meetings are perfect for that.

Every last minute of them!!

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