Monday, May 11, 2009

Meeting Minutes

I spend far too many hours of every day, week, month and year in meetings. It drives me completely insane. I find it even more annoying that fingernails scratching across a chalkboard, chewing on aluminum foil and all those other irritating things.

Don’t get me wrong. Occasionally meetings can be incredibly productive – things get discussed, people walk away with things they need to confirm or do and everyone feels warm and productive (fuzzy and squishy are not adjectives that can be applied to this topic, no matter how much you can convince me!).

However, the majority of the meetings I’ve attended are absolutely painful! To the point that I’d rather get a spinal tap. I honestly think there has to be a better way to get work done than to have all these meetings.

On one occasion, my collegue and I were in a meeting with a number of attendees. But, only she and I were talking to each other and discussing the issue. So we decided to continue to conduct the meeting as if I were just a conversation between us. The reason these people were on this meeting was because they ‘had’ to…How obnoxious and ridiculous was that?

Many times meetings end up being just like this, except that it’s other people just talking to each other and not listening to each other. And nothing gets done. Occasionally, what drives me most insane about these meetings is how people multi-task through them and so you end up having to repeat yourself a number of times.

Let me tell you, there really isn’t a better feeling than repeating yourself a number of times to someone who doesn’t even have enough consideration to put you on mute and you have to listen to their nails clicking the keys of their keyboard. Here’s to hoping you have fewer meetings in your life than I do.

1 comment:

M said...

Ditto everything you said here. Have the meeting with the person/people who are essential, then send an email summary and cc everyone else. Like PowerPoint presentations, most people use meetings incorrectly and ineffectively.