Boring Meetings Suck: Get More Out of Your Meetings, or Get Out of More Meetings

Consider Not Having One

My first piece of advice? When in doubt, don't. Who said you had to have a meeting in the first place?

I think many times we have meetings just to have meetings, because we want to appear busy to our peers, boss, and family, or because we simply don't know what else to do, and having meetings seems to be what everyone else is doing, so why not us?

There are a mass of things you could be doing instead of being trapped in the corporate closet of a conference room. However, there are certainly real reasons (and good reasons) to have face-to-face meetings. Determining the difference is the key.

Just to recap, a meeting is simply an assembly or conference of people coming together to achieve a common goal through communication and interaction.

Meetings may happen in person, via telephone, through videoconference, or in the form of online media interactive presentations. They can be one-time occasions (conferences), recurring (staff meetings with recurring objectives), or series meetings (recurring meetings with new objectives). No matter how you spin it, your normal meetings will fall into one or a combination of these categories:

• Planning
• Information sharing
• Evaluation
• Recognition

Typically, we default to a meeting when we need to address one of these group-collaboration categories. And the default result for many of them is, of course, everything this book is opposed to.

The first order of business should be to exhaust all other options to accomplish your ...