by John J. Walters<\/p>\n
I stumbled across this humorous image<\/a> about meetings as I was scouring the web for seed ideas for this week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blog post, and it reminded me of why we started this site in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 Simply put: meetings suck.\u00c2\u00a0 But they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people regard meetings as pointless wastes of time, and in many cases they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re right to do so.<\/p>\n The idea of paying employees to sit through weekly (sometimes daily) meetings that can only be described as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153complete wastes of time\u00e2\u20ac\u009d must make most business owners cringe.\u00c2\u00a0 But if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all bad, then why don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we abolish meetings entirely?<\/p>\n Meetings are an unfortunate reality of life in the business world, but they certainly don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be as bad as they are.\u00c2\u00a0 We have emails, phone calls, and text messages to keep employees updated.\u00c2\u00a0 We have services like PBworks<\/a> (which MeetingCaptain<\/a> syncs with, incidentally) to allow coworkers to facilitate collaboration without anyone being in the same room.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people resent the technological leash that businesses are using these days, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure they would resent it a lot less if it meant a massive reduction in the number and length of pointless meetings they are required to attend.<\/p>\n True, some things need to be hashed out in a group setting.\u00c2\u00a0 When my team was working together on the first draft of our book, our weekly meetings were essential to keeping the project rolling and maintaining a high quality of work.\u00c2\u00a0 The idea that we would all have to justify our work to each other on a weekly basis provided a healthy atmosphere of competition and accountability.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, we often found ourselves going over the allotted time because we had so much to accomplish.<\/p>\n If I wanted to keep the meeting to a manageable length, I found that I sometimes had to shortchange my own work even though I was the team lead and project manager.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I realized that if I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to cut work time, I had to make an effort to cut the seemingly obligatory logistics update at the beginning of the meeting.\u00c2\u00a0 How did I do this?\u00c2\u00a0 By making good use of technology.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have MeetingCaptain or PBworks to help me back then.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of adding everyone to one online workspace and using that to store the latest files and communicate important updates I had to send a lot of emails and keep painstaking account of each and every draft.\u00c2\u00a0 It required a lot of preparation, but it also allowed me to keep the meetings shorter than two hours.\u00c2\u00a0 It also placed the burden almost entirely on me to make sure we had a good meeting, even though I was only one of the seven participants.<\/p>\n Running a good meeting requires a lot of strategizing and coordinating.\u00c2\u00a0 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a fact.\u00c2\u00a0 But if you can take care of the first part, then technology can take care of the second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by John J. Walters I stumbled across this humorous image about meetings as I was scouring the web for seed ideas for this week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blog post, and it reminded me of why we started this site in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 Simply put: meetings suck.\u00c2\u00a0 But they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people regard meetings as pointless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![this humorous image<\/a> about meetings as I was scouring the web for seed ideas for this week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blog post, and it reminded me of why we started this site in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 Simply put: meetings suck.\u00c2\u00a0 But they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people regard meetings as pointless wastes of time, and in many cases they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re right to do so.<\/p>\nThe idea of paying employees to sit through weekly (sometimes daily) meetings that can only be described as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153complete wastes of time\u00e2\u20ac\u009d must make most business owners cringe.\u00c2\u00a0 But if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all bad, then why don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we abolish meetings entirely?<\/p>\nMeetings are an unfortunate reality of life in the business world, but they certainly don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be as bad as they are.\u00c2\u00a0 We have emails, phone calls, and text messages to keep employees updated.\u00c2\u00a0 We have services like PBworks<\/a> (which MeetingCaptain<\/a> syncs with, incidentally) to allow coworkers to facilitate collaboration without anyone being in the same room.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people resent the technological leash that businesses are using these days, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure they would resent it a lot less if it meant a massive reduction in the number and length of pointless meetings they are required to attend.<\/p>\nTrue, some things need to be hashed out in a group setting.\u00c2\u00a0 When my team was working together on the first draft of our book, our weekly meetings were essential to keeping the project rolling and maintaining a high quality of work.\u00c2\u00a0 The idea that we would all have to justify our work to each other on a weekly basis provided a healthy atmosphere of competition and accountability.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, we often found ourselves going over the allotted time because we had so much to accomplish.<\/p>\nIf I wanted to keep the meeting to a manageable length, I found that I sometimes had to shortchange my own work even though I was the team lead and project manager.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I realized that if I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to cut work time, I had to make an effort to cut the seemingly obligatory logistics update at the beginning of the meeting.\u00c2\u00a0 How did I do this?\u00c2\u00a0 By making good use of technology.<\/p>\nUnfortunately, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have MeetingCaptain or PBworks to help me back then.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of adding everyone to one online workspace and using that to store the latest files and communicate important updates I had to send a lot of emails and keep painstaking account of each and every draft.\u00c2\u00a0 It required a lot of preparation, but it also allowed me to keep the meetings shorter than two hours.\u00c2\u00a0 It also placed the burden almost entirely on me to make sure we had a good meeting, even though I was only one of the seven participants.<\/p>\nRunning a good meeting requires a lot of strategizing and coordinating.\u00c2\u00a0 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a fact.\u00c2\u00a0 But if you can take care of the first part, then technology can take care of the second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by John J. Walters I stumbled across this humorous image about meetings as I was scouring the web for seed ideas for this week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blog post, and it reminded me of why we started this site in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 Simply put: meetings suck.\u00c2\u00a0 But they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people regard meetings as pointless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/ifaq.wap.org\/posters\/meetings.gif\"){kind=link}