My Review: 4
Meetings, in general, are difficult to like. They can be fun, with the right group, and if they are stay relevant and on track. But too often meetings end up lasting 6 times longer than necessary. Right now, I am sitting in a meeting that started at 10:00 AM. It is currently 2:40 PM. We broke for lunch (about 20 minutes) but basically its been straight through.
Jeremy (a friend who writes a blog called Live Digitally) once said that he thinks meetings should never need to last more than an hour. I buy into that philosophy, and here’s why:
- Once you go past 1 hour, you are probably beyond the attention span of most of the participants
- If you have more to talk about than you can fit in one hour, you are probably trying to do too much in one meeting
- Or, you have more people in the meeting than really need to participate
Now, a good meeting can actually be pretty enjoyable. You feel like you accomplished something, you reached consensus with a group of people you trust, and you have a clear plan of action to move forward. And you did all that in 51 minutes. That would get a 7 or 8 in my book, because there is a lot of satisfaction in work done well.
But too many meetings run over long, with too many people expressing dumb-ass opinions that don’t move the topic forward. So on the whole, I have to give “meetings” (in general) a score of 4 out of 10.
——————————————————————————————————————–
Update 8/23/2007
It is now 4:13 PM, and I have been in the same meeting for more than 6 hours. Sighhh.
I couldn’t agree more (as I walk into a meeting myself).