by John J. Walters
I don’t know if meetings have sucked since the dawn of time, but I am willing to believe it.
Legend has it that the reason we all yawn when we see someone else do it is because we have been trained by generation upon generation of tribesman to gracefully yawn when the chief started to look tired, indicating that the tribal council was concluded. If that’s not a boring meeting, then I don’t know what is.
Then again, I am also willing to believe the opposite. Back in the day, people just didn’t have that much going on. They liked reading long books by authors like Dostoevsky and Jules Verne because they just had so much time and so little to do with it. There’s only so much plowing one can do while the sun is up, and once it goes down it’s easier to crack open a thick book by the fire than try to hitch torches to your horses.
The whole reason for the “drawing room” of the Victorian age was to provide a place for men to retire after dinner and smoke long pipes and talk — in essence, to “meet.” Not everyone had a drawing room; in fact it only the rich who could afford such a luxury. So imagine that: people actually looked forward to meetings, and peasants fantasized about adding an extra room to their cottage so they, too, could have meetings one day.
Not so much, these days. It’s been said that idleness is an invention of modern-day capitalism. If this is true, it’s because we have the capacity to be so productive so fast that we can afford to spend large amounts of time eating chips and watching reality tv in our underwear, which is clearly much more fulfilling than “productivity.” Why smoke long pipes in the drawing room when we could be doing whatever we want? Sky-diving; internet-shopping; toilet-training; rope-skipping — anything, really, besides meeting.
The thing to keep in mind, then, is that there are about a hojillion things that everyone at every meeting everywhere would rather be doing than meeting. Your job, as a meeting creator, is to keep them there for the absolute minimum amount of time possible while still accomplishing the tasks at hand.
How to do that? Well, that right there is the million dollar question, and the question that I will attempt to answer in my weekly posts. Thanks for checking in, and happy reading!