How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting

dominique_cimafranca writes "Forbes columnist Dan Woods describes a change in the way some companies handle meetings. Owing to instant messaging and younger tech-savvy CEOs, meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week. Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective."

Comments

Bravo, Bravissimo

[ls671]

> meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week

Bravo, Bravissimo. Many of us have been aware of time wasted on meetings for quite a while.

Let's be clear, planning is necessary and some meetings still might be needed. I guess almost everybody knows what I am talking about... ;-))

I am sure Dilbert hasn't got the monopoly on this topic but here are some links anyway...

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-23/

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2001-12-15/

http://www.revold.no/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Dilbert_MeetingMadness.jpg

http://brontesaurus.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/dilbert-meeting.gif

http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/30000/1000/900/31967/31967.strip.gif

http://slcta.net/images/dilbert2007112223221.gif

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[sznupi]

It's almost funny (if it didn't demonstrate certain sad mindset...) that the columnist from TFA proposes ways to make this "meetingless" management effective.

While, in large part, this shift to a less bloated meetings is a measure of increased effectivness.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[eln]

As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call. There's also the issue that workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if it's just a weekly status meeting. For whatever reason, email communication just doesn't serve the same purpose as effectively.

30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive (and lots of people in my organization have that and even more scheduled every single week), but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little. The key is balance and making sure the meetings you schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose. Further, invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel. I've seen plenty of times when someone isn't quite sure who to invite, so rather than taking the time to find out they'll just invite anyone they can think of who might possibly have some input, which makes meetings chaotic and overly long. Further, recurring meetings should be kept short and to the point. Scheduling an hour every week is usually not necessary for most things, and if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time, even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.

Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Monkeedude1212]

I would KILL to have a 2 hour meeting per week!

We currently have about a 5 minute whiteboard session every other day from the Manager, and are left to Execute everything as we go. We used to have a 2 hour meeting last year, about every month. Those were good times.

Man, if 30 hours a week was ever a norm, that'd be awesome! Sitting and talking about how awesome it'd be to get stuff done. I mean, they do realize that there are only 40 hours in a work week, right? Thats like 2 hours a day of actual work!

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[yurtinus]

While I laud the efforts in reducing meeting time, I am not yet convinced that the ends justify the means...

Slashdot, I ask you this: can u tolr8 this blud on ur hands?

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Altus]

One of the thing I like about Agile development (and its got some huge flaws no doubt) is the 15 minute daily meeting. It replaces status reports which take too long, are rarely accurate and are often not read by bosses or coworkers and replaces them with a fast, efficient meeting (if done correctly) where everyone gets a quick update on what other people are up too. It helps you to see your part in the overall project, helps to spot issue before they come up and give you some face time with the team and your boss.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[nomadic]

I mean, they do realize that there are only 40 hours in a work week, right?

Can I have your job?

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Pharmboy]

Some of us really LIKE the work we do. Its the people we do it with that we don't like. If I had to do less actual work, and spend more time with the people I do the work with, I would quit.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[TheLink]

In most real world meetings a participant's "CPU usage" is mostly idle during the entire meeting. This is very inefficient.

From a productivity point of view a big potential benefit of IM/IRC meetings is that participants can be in more than one meeting at the same time (and maybe even do other stuff too).

Also it is less disruptive if people leave the meeting briefly (toilet etc) and come back - because they can scroll back to see what they missed. As for minutes, they can just do a summary at the end (e.g. who is going to do what and by when) and then submit the entire log to a designated place (so managers/others can have a record of what's happening).

By allocating certain days/periods for "formal" IM meetings to be held, and allowing them to overlap, you can free up more time for people to do stuff that requires full concentration.

These sort of meetings might not be so acceptable with external parties, but they should be fine for many internal meetings.

I've actually suggested this at my workplaces before, but so far most seem to prefer "traditional meetings".

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[robot256]

As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call.

Then again, communicating properly in text is a skill that can be learned and developed. Young people who spend their lives text messaging have a great deal more experience expressing themselves in text than the previous generation, which may lead to more productive digital conversations.

Also, IM is different from email in that it is much easier to have a back-and-forth like in a spoken conversation. It also discourages having a huge CC list like emails where 15 people have to wade through two people's misunderstanding, saving the company a lot of time.

Furthermore, in some topics text can have a higher effective bandwidth than the spoken word. For programmers, the ability to send properly formatted code snippets back and forth is a big advantage over sitting in a meeting room with a white board. Plus, for a lot of problems you just need sparse but frequent communication with someone while you are working, and IM is perfect for when you aren't in the same room.

Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.

Kudos to that!

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[clay_shooter]

Can I have my unused mod points back? Well run meetings can have a point and can advance the project/business. Poorly organised meetings are a time waster. 15 min standup meetings seem to work well. Recurring status or other meetings that can be great when they only cover the actual agenda. Electronic meeting support tools like email length the decision making process and provide all kinds of opportunities for misunderstanding. Live meetings can let you close a problem / issue on a schedue. The bandwidth a meeting run by IM is a loT slower so you you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for someone to finish typing. Of course that can be good since most of the time you're doing other work during the meeting and not paying attention. How many folks say they like IM meetings but really mean "my other stuff is more important than this meeting"?

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[EricWright]

We don't use agile in our department, but we have adopted the daily checkpoint meeting for these very reasons. Issues don't fester very long with this approach and a decision is typically made pretty quickly. When a decision can't be made that day, someone takes away an action item to make/secure that decision.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[netsavior]

yeah, meetings are significantly worse than doing actual work... if you do not think this, then you should not be doing the job that you are doing.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[kangsterizer]

well meetings shouldn't be about spending time with people (that kind of meeting can be done once a year or something and even be optional), meetings should only be there to actually help out the work to be done.
otherwise, its pointless. (well, most meetings are pointless if you ask me...)

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[billcopc]

IM is appreciated when people have a set amount of work that isn't time-based.

Face time is preferred when no one gives a shit and you just want to not sit at your desk for an hour.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[rwven]

You're exactly right about the 15 minute conference call. No one is complaining about 15 minute meetings here there.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Inda]

Meetings are the practical alternative to work!

Last week, I actually told someone to repeat the question as I was daydreaming. It got a laugh but I hoped, deep down, the speaker realised that long meetings are boring and non-productive. People who think that a 5,000 word speech makes them sound knowledgeable and important are deluded.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[rwven]

One of the biggest flaw to a stand-up/scrum though is that rarely are scrum masters gutsy enough to enforce the rules... 5 minute scrums often end up in hour long tangential time-wasters. Not that I don't agree with you in theory though. I've just had FAR more scrum meeting failures than successes.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[c-reus]

I believe it's even less than that in France

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Magnus Pym]

Good points all. The other function that meetings serve (that completely bypasses the mostly socially handicapped tech folks, myself included) is providing the inter-personal glue that holds groups and companies together, builds comradeship and makes individuals feel part of the team.

I can see some technical people go to a meeting and come away thinking `what a horrible waste of time'. And maybe it was a waste to them. But be assured, for every such discontented individual, there are two that are served.

Of course, I am referring to well-run meetings and not `dick-size' meetings as described by a subsequent poster.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Altus]

I think I have just had pretty good luck in that respect. If people don't know how to use the meetings (or are clinging to the old mindset of long meetings) then its probably a net loss.

One tactic used at one of my previous employers was to hold these meetings in small rooms (formerly offices, not meeting rooms) that didn't have a table or chairs. It does help a little at keeping people from being too long winded.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[sorak]

I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but the problem there is that deadlines have to be met, regardless of whether you are allowed to work on your project. I am currently finishing a major project where development slowed to a crawl because of daily meetings, side projects, and changing requirements. It was incredibly frustrating to spend two hours talking about what needs to be done, and then spend the remainder of the day fighting to free up one to two hours in which to actually do the work.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Lodragandraoidh]

I have to call BS on your statement that more effective communications occur with young people via text in all cases. I would posit that is an extremely rare edge case.

Writing is an art and a skill that has to be developed for clarity --- and too often even with the best quality and intentions, misunderstanding and confusion reigns supreme. It is something everyone struggles with, even after we have included various conventions in near real time communications (emoticons, and other indicators of emotional context) fatal disconnects between the sender and receiver occur.

Sometimes a face to face meeting is required to gauge the unspoken context. While I agree less meetings are not a bad thing, more care must be taken to choose meetings - particularly in an environment where there are less overall opportunity for face to face. Even then, leaders in such an environment must make more efforts to get face time on an informal basis.

Btw - did you react negatively to the phrase, "call BS on your statement"? There was no animosity in that statement from me - just the first turn of phrase that popped into my head. I left it in there on purpose. Without the process of editing, it is easy to cause confusion in excess of the perceived value gained from instantaneous communication.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Lumpy]

I've seen meetings go on for a solid day because no manager in the place would man up and take charge ore responsibility. everything kept going around and around, it's what jaded me against MBA's and how worthless they are.

I have wasted 8 hours in a meeting over a data protocol that I finally gave up and said," I'll write the damned spec, Hell I came up with a working prototype over the last 4 hours and it's already installed on the test server. Want to take a look?"

I was afterward talked to about stepping out of my bounds and embarrassing a couple of managers. I shrugged, and said, "if they would do their jobs, I would not have to do it for them"

I am so glad I don't work at a large corporation anymore...

P.S.: they used my spec, After a manager tweaked it by flipping two data fields and claiming it as his own.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Lumpy]

OMG! WTF? BBL... K?

If you call that "a great deal more experience expressing themselves in text" then I quit right now. Most of the young new college grads here can't communicate clearly to save their life.

Sandals with socks makes you look like a dork, why do these fresh college dweebs think it's acceptable to dress like that for casual Friday? Yet I can't wear my "I don't work here" T-shirt.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Anonymous Coward]

One tactic used at one of my previous employers was to hold these meetings in small rooms (formerly offices, not meeting rooms) that didn't have a table or chairs. It does help a little at keeping people from being too long winded.

Yeah. We tried that too. Then we all have to stand there for 90 minutes.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Grishnakh]

I used to really hate meetings too. Then I came to my current company, where meetings are extremely rare, and communication between management and engineers is almost non-existent. As a result, no one has any idea what anyone else is doing, and people are constantly reinventing the wheel, or taking far too much time to figure out something they could have had an answer to in a minute just by asking another engineer.

Everything here seems to be on a "need to know" basis (and no, it's not a defense contractor or the like), and the only communication is between the manager and his subordinates. There is no communication at all between engineers and their manager's manager; in normal companies I've worked in, it was possible to talk to your boss's boss once in a while, and normal to talk to them occasionally. Here, my boss's boss doesn't even know who I am, whereas when I was at Intel (at 100,000 employees back then), my boss's boss knew me on a first-name basis and said "hi" in the hallways.

The worst part was when I and all the other engineers in the company were called into a big meeting/conference call with the CEO to talk about our progress on this big new project which needed to be done in 4 months. Before this, no one in my team (except our manager) even knew about this looming deadline, and now the CEO is yelling at us about meeting it! In a normal company, there would have been monthly or bimonthly meetings with roadmaps presented to us, so that we all know what's going on and what's coming up. Not here; we only know what our boss personally comes to our desk and tells us.

I really miss the days when I had to waste time in meetings. At least I had some clue what was going on.

That said, a lot of times the information in meetings could be condensed or put into an email and sent to everyone, to save time.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[carp3_noct3m]

You are correct, but they key here is that EMAIL is not effective for this purpose. Things such as group IM, whiteboards, and Google Wave are very good at this. My new company uses (I know its nasty) Yahoo Messenger (obviously I just use pidgin to tie in) but it really does up productivity when you can have a quick IM (which if you are out of the office gets forwarded to your phone) or a conference chat or call. I'm currently having the lawyers take a look at using google products (wave, gtalk etc) and its privacy implications. Email is the modern equivalent of snail mail, and has its uses, but not in this situation.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[cayenne8]

"As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call. There's also the issue that workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if it's just a weekly status meeting. For whatever reason, email communication just doesn't serve the same purpose as effectively. "

Actually, I could honestly say that 99% of the meetings I have ever been forced to attend...were worthless wastes of my time. Really.

Most of the meetings I have done either in meatspace, or on teleconference, could have taken maybe 3 minutes of my productive time if they'd just emailed me. In these meetings, often 1 - 2 hrs most often, I sit, and twiddle my thumbs waiting till they might actually (not always) come up with something needing my input, or for me to listen to. Other than that, usually it is about some other people with problems I have nothing to do with. From my observations, it seems that mostly only the PHB types are the ones that 'need' meetings, and that is only because if they didn't have those, well...they'd likely not look like they were doing much around the office.

I think one of my favorite signatures I saw long ago was something like:

"Rome didn't conquer most of the known world by having meetings...

...They did it by KILLING their enemies."

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Z00L00K]

The importance of a meeting has an inverse relation to the number of participants.

A meeting of two is important, three is also important but when you have 15 or more people in a meeting it usually ends up in a yawn.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

If you call that "a great deal more experience expressing themselves in text" then I quit right now.

How dramatic.

Welp, to each is own, but I can happily say that the peeps I've been working with in their 20's to 30's communicate effectively enough via IM that I don't have to go physically talk to them all that often. Not bad considering I work in a visual industry.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Anonymous Coward]

You might find the Norwegian laws on holidays (esp. para 5) and working conditions (esp. para 10-5) interesting.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[mcguirez]

The columnist from TFA is not just a columnist but has actual experience. He has been involved in tech for quite some time. Besides writing an early book on JSP in the Enterprise, he was CTO of the street and a tech lead of Time-Warner's Pathfinder site in the 90s.

http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Woods/e/B001IODE6O/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1271274109&sr=1-1

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye! Bravo. What people waste 30 hours meeting about could be solved in a couple of simple, efficient emails. Copenhagen is a prime example.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Machtyn]

We actually cancelled our scrum meetings. They didn't last too long, but they were inefficient in getting any useful information out there. Granted, that's not a knock on the purpose of the scrum, but on how my company attempted to implement it. It turned out that it was far more efficient for our managers to pass info between the groups. (Which is fine in our small company, there isn't the petty office politicking that one might find in other companies.)

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Anonymous Coward]

Young people who spend their lives text messaging have a great deal more experience expressing themselves in text than the previous generation, which may lead to more productive digital conversations.

tl;dr

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[robot256]

I agree with your post. I did not mean to imply such a blanket statement, merely to qualify the GP's statement. I agree that many situations require unspoken context to avoid misunderstandings, but I also believe that in technical fields, at least, misunderstandings can just as easily arise from unspoken communication (especially when dealing with less-than-socially-adept geeks like myself, excuse the stereotype).

However, there are other reasons IM is useful in certain fields, like I tried to point out. Some problems are suited to being solved in a meeting, but others are not, and IM conversations can solve some of those problems much quicker and easier than a meeting. Like you said, it's all about making the meetings appropriate and effective.

I don't know about you, but I often do edit my IMs before I send them, especially when they are technical or possibly confusing. That's why I like IMs--I am a natural writer and frequently find it easier to organize my thoughts in writing than speaking. But again, this is not true for everyone, so I still have to go to meetings to explain myself.

However, the GP is right, if you can't communicate well, it doesn't matter what medium you're using--it's not going to be pretty.

Bottom line is some meetings are absolutely necessary, but IM and email, when used effectively, can increase efficiency and should not be ruled out. And under all of this lies the fact that there is no cure, technological or otherwise, for bad managers and bad communication skills.

P.S. I long ago learned to well-edit my /. posts or face grammar- and fact-checking ridicule. For example, I spent about 10 minutes writing and editing this post. Slashdot has helped me hone my sound-byte writing skills enough that I recently got a letter published in a major newspaper that read very much like one of my slashdot posts.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[PachmanP]

30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive

I'm a consultant, you insensitive clod!

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[xaxa]

Many of the older people don't communicate effectively either.

I communicate very effectively, but I re-read almost everything I type and usually make changes. I don't think age has much to do with this.

[An extra sentence was removed from this post, I decided it wasn't interesting.]

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[xaxa]

Mine is 37.5hr/week, with 30 days holiday a year (plus the 8 public holidays).

Unfortunately, this is very much reflected in my paycheque :-(

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[vertinox]

Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.

Excessive meetings tend to be the symptom of an improperly managed business.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[jonadab]

> As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed.

Oh, absolutely. Where I work, we once went five months between meetings (the boss was busy...), and it was clearly FAR too long. When we finally had a meeting again, it went on for over two and a half hours, because of all the things we needed to cover, and we still didn't cover everything. We had another long meeting the next month, just trying to catch up.

These days we try to have a meeting every month if possible, or at least not miss two months in a row.

So if your meetings are running long because you have too many things to cover, it's a sign you could maybe do with having meetings a little more often.

> workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have
> at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if
> it's just a weekly status meeting.

Umm, if you have no communication with your boss except at meetings, your boss clearly isn't doing his job right. That's all I have to say about that.

> 30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive

I should say so. How on earth would you ever get any work done?

> but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little.

I suppose it depends on what you're doing, but if we had to sit through two hours of meetings every week where I work, it would be a complete waste of time *and* would drive us all out of our minds.

> The key is balance and making sure the meetings you
> schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose.

Agreed. If you find that more than about a third of the time in your meetings is basically unproductive for most of the people in the room, you're having too many of the darned things.

> invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel.

Depends on the purpose of the meeting. Sometimes you need to get everyone in your group together. We have monthly meetings for everyone on staff, but admittedly we're small. We fit around a single table and can all see one another's faces. I guess in a larger organization this would be a department meeting or a team meeting or something, depending on how you're organized.

> if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time,
> even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.

If you find this happening, you're having too many meetings.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[jonadab]

> Also, IM is different from email in that it is much easier
> to have a back-and-forth like in a spoken conversation.

That's only because most people these days use absolutely wretched email software.

The thing about email is, you *can* let it sit and wait until you get around to checking it, but you don't *have* to do things that way all the time. If you happen to be on at the same time as someone else, you certainly can (with decent software) have a back-and-forth that's faster than any IM service I've ever seen. When I was in college we used to have email conversations back-and-forth sometimes even when we were in the same computer lab together, because it created a record, let both people talk at once, and didn't disturb the other people in the room.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[jyx]

every one has their breaking point and you found mine.

I can mostly handle txt speak, but WTF is up with ur == (your|you're)?

Every time I see 'ur' I cant help but mentally pronounce it 'uhrrr', as in what dumb giant cartoon character grunt when posed with a difficult question or situation.

Why not yr? Shirley it is a more obvious representation of what is trying to be conveyed?

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[knorthern knight]

> I think one of my favorite signatures I saw long ago was something like:
> "Rome didn't conquer most of the known world by having meetings...
> ...They did it by KILLING their enemies."

Meetings are inefficient by definition. They consume hours, and generate minutes.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Clemsonuee]

But then you went and added it back by talking about how you removed the sentence. And now I'm writing about that, so it's a net loss.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[jonadab]

> Writing is an art and a skill that has to be developed for clarity

So is speaking, and while nearly everyone takes at least a couple of years of writing classes in school, many people get through high school and sometimes even college without a single hour of training for speaking. And it shows. You ask someone to face-to-face to explain an issue to you, and out of their mouth pours stuff like "So okay, so you know like the thing I was saying like the other day, right? Okay, so umm here's the thing. Okay. You know how we were umm thinking about moving in like a new direction with that, right? Okay, so umm what I was thinking was, okay, what we could do is, umm, take that and go with it. Okay, so, like, what do you think?"

And yes, there *are* also people who do that in writing. Some of them are on Slashdot even. But they are in the minority. Face-to-face, speaking, at least half the population talks like that. People do it so much, you don't even notice it most of the time, because your brain has learned to filter it out. Nonetheless, it *does* make communicating anything take longer. And while the speaker is figuring out what he actually wants to say, the listener is sitting there nodding politely, instead of working on something else.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[The Beezer]

100% agreed. It's about the results and the relationships. You need both to be successful long-term.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[mjwx]

Can I have your job?

Yes, but you'll have to take a pay cut. Smaller companies cant compete on wages, so conditions are generally better. The company I'm working for now has required no overtime in the 5 months I've worked here (but I'm also bored shitless as everything is running smoothly, boredom is why I'm looking for alternate employment). Just don't become too invested in the company (shares, positions of authority and so forth) as then you will be working 60 or 80 hour weeks for little money.

You'll also have to move to Australia but for that you children get quality affordable education (public and private) and your entire family gets access to a top notch public health system for peanuts.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[defaria]

If u hdn't notised teh literacy rate of ur avg office wrker has gone dwn tremd^h^h^h... a lot in recent yrs.... and im not only talking bout so called chat speek, or mispellings, either. every body can stop complaning bout silly punkuation errs to - we all no what was said. and if we happen 2 4get a wrd like 'know" and change the meening to b positive when we mean negtive, well we R HUMAN YA NO! we all no tht the computer can use spel checkers and grandma chequeors to correct 4 such things... even though peeps still 4get 2 use em. ppl just dont no how 2 comunicate any more!

But seriously, email communication can work as effectively as face to face communications but you have to know how to write effectively and put a little effort into it! The art of writing effectively and clearly has all but disappeared in today's society. The above paragraph is done in humor and is actually hard for me to do because I don't communicate like that. However I do see such actual chat speak like communications being passed of as legitimate business communications.

Writing effectively can be a challenge but I often find, in the world of computers where exacting details are pretty much a requirement for the computer, that attempting to properly and adequately convey the details of the situation often causes me to figure out the problem myself!

Besides, email communications provides a record of the communications that have happened and serve as a good knowledge base later to search for topics and solutions. Again, though, this requires well written emails to start with! To have a meeting and waste everybody's time only to then have to type it up anyway strikes me as largely an exercise in futility.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Anonymous Coward]

Meetings are, quite frankly, a waste of time. I used to work for a Japanese company who would spend 2 hour a day on meetings just to listen to updates on each person's status. Now, working for a startup, and using all the technology available to me, I can update superiors on the status of my work with minimum hassle (via text messaging, chat, Flowdock, even Yammer). We don't need to bother each other anymore that much, and I can spend most of my time getting things done.

Most of the time in those meetings are spent listening to discussions I am not directly involved with, so why bother? Unless I am a project leader or a higher-up who needs to involve myself with every aspect of the company, I really don't need to meet with all of my people at once.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[rwven]

They should force scrum drivers to wear full business suits and bring all the staff in tiny, un-air-conditioned rooms. That way the longer they are, the hotter the room gets. Either the driver is going to pass out, or the developers are going to jump him.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[yurtinus]

There are two primary reasons "yr" cannot be used in place of "ur":

1) Phonetically, "yr" does not match the root term as spoken aloud.

2) The abbreviation "yr" is already used for "year." As in "omg justn beeb trns 16 yrs 2day!!"

I have some theories on additional reasons for the "ur" abbreviation - I am under the assumption that this entire speech paradigm was created by a truly brilliant individual in order to laugh at grown adults saying "ur my bff" in everyday speech. Studies are ongoing, expect to see something printed in a peer-viewed journoblag sometime next year.

...and don't call me Shirley.

Obligatory

[andyh3930]

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-05/

Or you could say...

[Anonymous Coward]

...these horrible technologies turn every hour of every day into an eternal meeting.

Re:Or you could say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah, tech un-savvy media pundit fawns over yet poorly understood 'youth' activity. Those who have used computers for 40 years roll eyes upwards. An industry has arisen around breathless reporting by the techno-retrograde over every new fad, all hoping to hit discoverer gold. How this beats a conference call remains unknown.

Re:Or you could say...

[Xtravar]

Meetings are sometimes the most exhaustive part of my work day. Maybe *that's* why we all bitch about them so much - it takes work for us socially dysfunctional nerds to communicate our ideas in a socially acceptable way.

Also, the meetings that aren't intensive are a good break from the daily grind.

I can sympathize with the anti-meeting sentiment, but it's not always the case.

Re:Or you could say...

[outlander78]

Exactly right - meetings never end, interruptions never stop, and drive-by management becomes an even easier habit to fall into. It may be tiresome, but there are real benefits to getting the right people into a room, and focusing on the problem at hand. Where chat rooms and follow-on technologies really shine is enabling these meetings over great distances.

Re:Or you could say...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm listening to a "state of the $company" meeting right now. I can continue to work and post on slashdot while in the meeting. Works for me.

I don't know

[Lord Bitman]

I've been sitting in an IRC channel with all the devs all day every day. Sounds like an all-day meeting to me, it's just more efficient.

Re:I don't know

[AlXtreme]

Especially as you can easily "opt-out" of said all-day virtual meeting. Disable IRC, IM, e-mail and turn off your mobile and you can actually get some work done.

Then again, I'm finding monthly in-person meetings per project are necessary to keep everyone updated. Video/voice-conferencing only works to a certain degree on complex projects, sometimes it's just more efficient to get everyone together.

Re:I don't know

[delinear]

Exactly, this kind of technology just allows some similarity with everyone sitting in one room - which in itself would remove much of the need for meetings (it's occasinally still more productive to get a subset of people together face to face to talk issues over). The other benefit I find with working this way over traditional meetings is that, unless the entire meeting is centred around me and what I'm doing, it's usually more productive for me to dip in and out as required and be doing other things in the meantime. In a meat-space meeting, that's not really possibly unless everyone takes laptops along, and what usually happens is I lose interest then suddenly realise when someone does ask me a question that I've not been listening for the past five minutes and have no context. With online meetings, there is a trail I can follow if necessary to find out what the question was really about, so I don't need to give 100% of my focus to the meeting. We also seem to lose at least 10 minutes out of every meeting because some people won't be there on time, or need to go pick something up from the copier, or someone's stolen the room and we have to relocate, etc - might seem small but having a room full of devs sitting around doing nothing while some manager is late back from a pub lunch can soon start to become an expensive pursuit.

Re:I don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially as you can easily "opt-out" of said all-day virtual meeting. Disable IRC, IM, e-mail and turn off your mobile and you can actually get some work done.

And then fall hopelessly behind because the rest of the dev team, all indoctrinated to use IRC and only IRC as their communication method (even if you turned e-mail back on, still no word), change parts of the toolchain you're using under your feet.

When you hop back in IRC and ask what the new changes are, you get disdainful responses wondering where the hell YOU'VE been for the past two days and why you weren't monitoring all of the twenty or so IRC channels to know that in one of them, as a side topic, two guys were incrementally making complete, incompatible replacements to the tools you were just using, refuse to maintain the old stuff, and turn up their noses at you for even suggesting that perhaps finding a better way to let everyone know what's going on would help everyone in the end.

Sure. Opt-out of said all-day virtual meeting. Good plan. Where do you live, again? I hear there's going to be a job opening right in your cube or office real soon...

Re:I don't know

[tompaulco]

In a meat-space meeting, that's not really possibly unless everyone takes laptops along, and what usually happens is I lose interest then suddenly realise when someone does ask me a question that I've not been listening for the past five minutes and have no context.
This is my problem with most meetings that I am in these days. Everybody has a laptop and/or a phone that they are playing with and no one is paying attention. Every question has to be asked twice. It is really annoying and wastes the time of everyone in the meeting.

Update your resumes guys.

[AnonymousClown]

To succeed in the long term and at scale, stream-of-consciousness management must be supplemented in the following ways:

All of you using IRC and email now have experience in "stream-of-consciousness management". Don't forget or otherwise the resume scanners will pass you over and when you're in the first interview, the HR drone will say you don't have up to date skills and chuck your resume away.

Re:Update your resumes guys.

[QuantumRiff]

Do they have to carry "The Catcher in the Rye" on themselves to be a "stream-of-consciousness" manager?

30 hours

[alxkit]

so *ahem* 30 hours of talk and 10 hours of "work"? no wonder some companies can't get shit done.

I got a better one

[Anonymous Coward]

How IM and SMS Are Killing the Languages All Over the World.

Re:I got a better one

[hardburn]

When does English get to become inflected again like all the cool languages?

Re:I got a better one

[selven]

When does English get to become inflected again like all the cool languages?

Don't you mean:

When do English get to become inflect again like all the cool language?

Re:I got a better one

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean "when to do english to get to become to inflect again like all the cool language"?

Help! We're wasting our time Doing Stuff!

[Rogerborg]

We need to get back to the Old Ways, where we invested all of time more wisely in Talking About Doing Stuff. We fear this new fangled "work".

Justify their Existence

[Qzukk]

Thirty hours of a forty-hour workweek devoted to meetings? I'm sure managers are getting nervous at the idea you can spend two hours a week on meetings and 38 hours a week getting stuff done.

Just like I have to show that I've gotten something done for the company in order to justify my paycheck, maybe it's time for the meeting-happy managers to show that their meetings have provided value to the company.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Anonymous Coward]

it's time for the meeting-happy managers to show that their meetings have provided value to the company.

And when are they going to do that? At another meeting?

Re:Justify their Existence

[timmarhy]

i think we need to schedule a bi monthly meeting so we can present our progress on this. i'll order the snacks.

Re:Justify their Existence

[shadowofwind]

I'm sure managers are getting nervous at the idea you can spend two hours a week on meetings and 38 hours a week getting stuff done.

Except that 'getting stuff done' is not necessarily how they spend the other 38 hours. At a company I worked at recently, much of the remaining 38 hours was spent maneuvering for political advantage. The reason there are fewer meetings isn't necessarily because the management is more efficient, but because they're not bothering to manage. And as bad as micro-management is, every-man-for-himself doesn't work very well on most projects either.

Re:Justify their Existence

[kick6]

Thirty hours of a forty-hour workweek devoted to meetings? I'm sure managers are getting nervous at the idea you can spend two hours a week on meetings and 38 hours a week getting stuff done.

Sadly, the 40 hour work week is a failed assumption. Salaried people are expected to get their stuff done however long it takes. Which means that you're meeting 30 hours a week.............and working an additional 30.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, you're right - as a web developer, everything I do has to provide quantifiable benefit, we have analytics for pretty much every part of every project, but meetings are a big black hole that suck up everyone's time and have no measurable benefit. Maybe meetings should be more democratic, everyone gets a buzzer and if more than 50% of the people at the meeting buzz to say it's a waste of time, it automatically ends. I've sat in too many meetings with managers who like the sound of their own voices, or don't even realise that they're talking in circles or going off on tangents - all well and good if I've nothing better to do and have time to waste, but more often than not I'm sitting there thinking this is all time I'll need to make up unpaid, out of hours, to catch up with my own workload.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. hear hear!

Re:Justify their Existence

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're that much of a pushover, it's your problem. Get a backbone and refuse. You only live once, don't squander your EXTREMELY SMALL time in this world.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Demonantis]

I think you missed something about this being about the CEO of the company. Of course he is in meeting for 75% of his schedule. He is hired to communicate the operations of the company to share holders and directions to the internal management. The other 25% is probably prep time for the presentations that he is making during the meetings. This is just a case of technology replacing the meeting because the CEO chooses to communicate through another medium then speech.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Thaelon]

show that their meetings have provided value to the company

There's a meeting for that.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Maltheus]

The meetings are what justify their existence. That's all management does. They meet with their subordinates to find out what's going on and then meet with their superiors to pass that information along. Occasionally, they'll make decisions that get in everyone's way and make the job take longer. But most of the day to day decisions are made by the workers. For what managers really do, you can have low paid interns take care of it.

Managers are little more than glorified welfare queens. And most jobs these days seem to have a one to one manager to worker ratio (throwing in PMs and tech leads). Actually, the job I'm at now has it at 2 to 1 presently. And of course this leads to the need for all sorts of metrics and monitoring tools that completely sap the productivity of the workers. Just about every project I've ever been on takes about 20 times longer than it should take because of the influence of management. I'm not saying that management can be done away with entirely, but you can safely trim out 90% of it, invest in tools (like computers less than 10 years old) and see tremendous productivity gains. Of course, it's not about productivity or the bottom line, it's all just a form of privatized welfare.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Grishnakh]

The reason there are fewer meetings isn't necessarily because the management is more efficient, but because they're not bothering to manage. And as bad as micro-management is, every-man-for-himself doesn't work very well on most projects either.

That's exactly how it is at my current company. Managers simply don't bother to manage, at least not using any kind of communications. They just sit around and talk to other managers (particularly project managers) and play with Gantt charts. We engineers generally have no idea what's going on, and just wait for our boss to come by our desk to talk with us; that's the only communication we ever get.

Re:Justify their Existence

[shadowofwind]

We engineers generally have no idea what's going on

One former coworker's theory is that lack of communication is how this type of manager maintains their position. "Knowing what's going on" is the only resource they have that sets them apart from the much lower paid people they stand upon, so they guard it jealously.

Re:Justify their Existence

[Grishnakh]

Hmm.. that's interesting. I'm not so sure my boss is paid much more than I am, however. He's been here for his whole career, and I'm one of those people that changes jobs every few years and gets a giant raise in the process.

You're probably right though. This boss also thinks he's a technical expert in everything, when he's really not, and makes a lot of technical decisions that are wrong.

Re:Justify their Existence

[ckaminski]

Its old, it's dated, it may not even be accurate anymore, but every time I bring up replacing the 15 or so managers here with one secretary, I get funny looks and implied threats of being fired... :-)

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html

This is a *good thing*

[Aurisor]

I work for a very successful, young company which is run by a very young CEO. On average, I have no meetings at all. We're currently in a huge crunch right now, which means I have 3-minute check-ins at the beginning and the end of the day.

Long meetings have been the butt of jokes for as long as I can remember, and for good reason: they're a giant waste of time, especially for technical people.

This looks very much like one of those articles people will be mocking in 10 years. This really makes Forbes look like they're clinging to the 20th century...how embarrassing.

Re:This is a *good thing*

[Anonymous Coward]

Long meetings have been the butt of jokes for as long as I can remember, and for good reason: they're a giant waste of time, especially for technical people.

This is usually true. But I have come around to the power of meetings 'once and awhile'. Sometimes it is better to cut off the stream of IM's and emails and just stick everyone in the same room and hash it out. This does have upsides. EVERYONE is focused on the task at hand and not the other 20 things they were doing. Everyone works towards a solution. Now do this too much though and you never get anything done. Dont do it enough and you start to see the other 'micro meetings' getting hijacked for other tasks with the wrong people in them.

Balance is key. Too much is bad too little is also bad.

Re:This is a *good thing*

[egcagrac0]

Balance is key. Too much is bad too little is also bad.

You've got it. The people who call meetings really need to understand the ramifications of having a meeting - "Stop everything you're doing, and let's talk for a few hours" is something that should be done sparingly if at all.

OTOH, a few minutes here and there to make sure that the right value is being added to the organization at the right time makes sense.

Re:This is a *good thing*

[ShinmaWa]

I have no meetings at all. We're currently in a huge crunch right now

For some reason, I just can't help but feel that these two things might actually be related.

What is a meeting for?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Ostensibly you hold meetings to do three things

1) Share current status
2) Discuss ideas
3) Plan

A good manager has all these worked out beforehand, and uses this preparation to lead the meeting effectively and efficiently.

If you are spending hours and hours in meetings with your team, something is terribly wrong.

Re:What is a meeting for?

[Nerdfest]

There are better tools than meetings to do 1, and maybe even 2.

Re:What is a meeting for?

[lwriemen]

I agree. DeMarco (and Lister?) stated that the "status" meeting is often a "status affirmation" meeting where the manager is proving they have the power to waste your time.

Re:What is a meeting for?

[Grishnakh]

You could send out any information that needs to be passed down in an email. However, the team does need to be able to sit around and talk about things and hash out any problems at some point.

Obviously, many companies go far overboard and spend too much time on meetings. However, there's others, like mine, that barely have any meetings at all, and also don't have any other method of communication to replace it (like the way some people use IRC, such as developers who are all working from home). As a result, no one knows very much about what's going on.

Re:What is a meeting for?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Share current status - "eeeuurrghhhh ... fuck, I got wasted big time last night, I still feel like a donkey shat in my mouth."

2) Discuss ideas - "I'm off for a joint in 15 minutes - wanna come along and have a drink afterwards too?"

3) Plan - "Right - you schedule us in for a 'progress meeting' for 2 hours, and we'll be good with HR stiffs. We'll get Karen some more chocolates on the way back and she'll cover our asses.

4) ... don't need no fucking profit - just a couple of Red Bulls and we're good to go

Seriously, and I really am serious, if you are spending hours and hours in meetings with your team, you should all be in the pub. We always had our most productive meetings in the pub, because representatives from most of the other departments were there too and the cross-polination and communications were so much more productive than "in the office".

Meetingless management

[GlL]

A little tear squeezed from the corner of my eye and I thought "Has heaven indeed begun to poke its head through into Earth?" Then I read the article and realized that the meetings have gone from as little as 30 hours a week to as long as the entire work week, just one long virtual meeting.
"Ahh, Hell! You sneaky bum, disguising yourself as heaven again only to suck in the unwary."

Re:Meetingless management

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Then I read the article and realized that the meetings have gone from as little as 30 hours a week to as long as the entire work week, just one long virtual meeting.

Where the hell do you people work that you spend that much time in meetings? I've been in the military, and worked as a contractor with meeting-loving, long-rambling-discussion-having government employees, and I doubt I've ever spent more than 20 hours in a single week in meetings. And those weeks were extremely rare--they maybe happened once or twice per year.

Have I just luckily dodged the horriffic work environments that exist out there, or are you people just embellishing your stories?

Re:Meetingless management

[GlL]

I think that this is slightly hyperbole, but in a couple of the places I have worked there were 60 hour work weeks with half of that being pointless meetings. 90% of the meetings were what I call "manager job justification" meetings. I specifically think of a consulting firm I worked for.

Problem when being sued?

[wbackner]

I wonder if using chat and email instead of meetings will lead to more issues when companies are sued. It is a lot easier to deny knowing about some product defect if it is just talked about in a meeting. However, if there are chat or email records then the company is more likely to get into trouble. It depends on what sort of logs they keep and how often everything is erased.

Re:Problem when being sued?

[zero_out]

In the last two companies that I have worked, it has become a policy to never, ever, retain log IMs. This is so that if we were ever sued, we had more deniability, because there were less records. If your IM client doesn't log the messages, then you don't need to go looking for them.

Re:Problem when being sued?

[Tim C]

Same thing applies to meetings actually. If you're doing things properly the meeting will have an agenda and will be minuted; these things should be filled away somewhere and can certainly be subpoenaed.

It all comes down to the process you're following and your record-keeping practices, but in general anything important that's decided should be recorded somewhere to guard against people forgetting or disagreeing.

Re:Problem when being sued?

[JackSpratts]

minutes can be extremely broad outlines of little specificity, along the lines of "gas peddles brought up, discussion ensued" ending with action taken, if any. dangerous in court? perhaps, but ambiguous enough to sidestep and for that reason not so hot for dispute resolutions. you may be thinking of transcripts, typed recordings of everything said at a meeting, usually backed up with video or audio recordings, which logged IMs would indeed be like. they are especially dangerous in opposing counsels' hands.

Re:Problem when being sued?

[yuhong]

It is a lot easier to deny knowing about some product defect if it is just talked about in a meeting. However, if there are chat or email records then the company is more likely to get into trouble. It depends on what sort of logs they keep and how often everything is erased.

Not that it is a good idea in the first place to do this, especially in this day and age.

Re:Problem when being sued?

[jbengt]

Since IM chats are typically very informal, records of them could get the company in trouble, so they should not be logged.
However, if anything important gets seriously discussed or decided, that should not be done over IM, as the company is much better off having records of that to defend themselves with. In my opinion e-mails, meeting minutes, etc. should be saved.
If saving those e-mails is bad for the company, the company is doing something wrong.

Re:Problem when being sued?

[ckaminski]

I would argue that if saving chat logs is bad for the company, the company is doing something wrong.

Those chatlogs might prove that you spent many man years trying to find this bug that caused stuck gas pedals and couldn't.

Then again, in America, BREATHING is likely to be bad for the company.

Please, oh please

[93 Escort Wagon]

Would someone please tell my boss about this?

The meetings will continue...

[Lendrick]

...until morale improves.

Good news & Bad news

[Anonymous Coward]

Good news: Fewer and shorter meetings.
Bad news: Now every time you're IM'd by your manager it is a meeting.
Good news: Everyone can be 'in the loop' all of the time
Bad news: It's even easier to keep people out of the loop
Good news: Everything is less formal -- no more meeting minutes or meeting rules
Bad news: Now every single scrap of paper and electronic barf that crosses your desk must be recorded and filed.
Good news: With laptops and smart phones you can have a 'meeting' at any time day or night ti fit your schedule
Bad news: Your manager does not know or care about your schedule -- just his own.

Good luck with that.

Re:Good news & Bad news

[Steauengeglase]

Bad news: Now every single scrap of paper and electronic barf that crosses your desk must be recorded and filed.

I'd say this is the one serious drawback. For the most part we have moved over to using IM to gut perhaps 60% of our meetings, but those IMs have segmented into:

-Company Client: No man's land of IMs, every word is saved internally, completely public and only the top dogs even touch it. Every word you type is an invitation for termination and hitting enter is like signing a mortgage.

-Pidgin: Logs are shared locally, unless you are an idiot and save it on a share; often used for poisioning your enemies well, spreading misinformation via modified logs, etc. Oddly enough it gets used more than anything else though the quality varies from dept to dept.

-GMail chat: No local records, completely off the radar and I have no idea how much work gets done there.

Pro-meeting folks just want CYA or at least a feeling of total control. For everyone else it is a tool. Regardless, I'd rather just answer an IM than put the effort into getting 8 or 9 people in the same place at the same time.

I've always told my staff...

[filesiteguy]

...there is no such thing as a "productive" meeting.

However, I'm not sure I can see a meeting where the meeting notes go somethng like: :)

Doing well.

LOL

Should we do lunch?

Y

OK, what next?

Project A

HTH!

Actually misguided

[MyLongNickName]

Technology, in and of itself, will not improve meetings. Effective management improves meetings.

Give a group of inefficient people an IM client, and they will be inefficient people IMing all day and interrupting.

I learned a lot about running meetings from effective managers and ineffective ones. My favorite example was a Senior VP for a regional bank. He held monthly meeting with all managers. Each manager was alloted time to speak. But you better damn well have something to say. Most managers passed time off to the next. Only the hihglights that really impacted the group as a whole got shared. Generally 15-20 people invited. Meetings 15-20 minutes. It was effective use of time, effective information. managers could seek each other out if they had other things to discuss.

Want to have good meetings?
* Invite only those that should be there. You don't need 3 marketing guys for your project kickoff meeting
* Above 8 or 9 invitees is a big fat warning sign.
* Have a written agenda. Circulate it beforehand.
* Have a hard end time to meetings. Make it intentionally shorter than it usually would go.
* Make decisions beforehand with the key people. Most decisions don't really get made in the big meeting. Two or three key decision makers on the same page and the rest follow or simply refine the decision.

Re:Actually misguided

[Eponymous Coward]

Don't forget that every single decision made in the meeting must have an associated "next action" assigned to somebody. Otherwise, there's no point in making that decision.

Re:Actually misguided

[LordSnooty]

Make decisions beforehand with the key people. Most decisions don't really get made in the big meeting. Two or three key decision makers on the same page and the rest follow or simply refine the decision.

So one of your solutions to effective meetings is to... have another meeting first? If you're making decisions prior then your main meeting sounds more like a "progress report".

Re:Actually misguided

[value_added]

Your recommendations presuppose a degree of professionalism on the part of the attendees. While that's a given in banking, law, finance, etc., I don't think it exists to the same degree elsewhere, particularly in IT. That's not to say such things can't be learned. Given enough time and sufficient motivation, children can be made to behave like adults, and ineffective managers can learn to manage.

Re:Actually misguided

[NeutronCowboy]

* Make decisions beforehand with the key people. Most decisions don't really get made in the big meeting. Two or three key decision makers on the same page and the rest follow or simply refine the decision.

I can't stress this one enough. Meetings are not the place to hash out decisions - especially if they're cross-departmental meetings. I've had untold meetings wasted where we finally managed to get all the head honchos together in the same room, and we spend the hour trying to come to an agreement on point 1, sub-point a.

Instead, have an individual talk with the people who either sign the pay checks or who have some sort of authority to make things happen. Come to an agreement before the meeting, and then just present the conclusions. Yes, you should still listen to objections from others in the meeting - after all, everyone's there for a reason. But you should never, ever walk have a meeting without knowing exactly who is going to say what.

If you can make this happens, meetings are short, productive, and leave people happy. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Re:Actually misguided

[DomNF15]

Technology, in and of itself, will not improve meetings. Effective management improves meetings.

No. Not having meetings improves meetings :-)

To be serious though, the points you mention are good ones, I'd also like to add, invite a "bad guy" - the bad guy's role will be to kick meeting derailers in the junk :-)

Re:Actually misguided

[wonkavader]

Not misguided, but under-informed. Let me just expand on what you've implied.

People think they can multitask. Young people who grow up with it especially are certain they can do it with little or no penalty. But they can't, as recent studies have shown.

The studies Tom DeMarco talks about in his programming management books (/Peopleware/ jumps to mind) which show that programming speed (and especially style) goes down with interruption and noise.

The assumption that the IM time is free and productive is a fallacy. Instead of paying for an annoying meeting for an hour a day, management is now paying for a low-level intrusion ALL DAY LONG. So while this may be an improvement, it needs to be quantified. (It may actually be a net loss of productivity.)

It is probably (though not certainly -- we need numbers and studies) more profitable to make meetings short and effective.

Re:Actually misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

If your decisions are made before the meeting takes place, don't bother with the meeting. Just dictate whatever you want in an e-mail. Nothing is a bigger time-waster than to go into a meeting where you think you'll have a chance of changing something for the better, only to find out that the office shmooze has already ganged up with the usual crowd to make sure things go for the worse.

Re:Actually misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

Every *single* decision? What about decisions not to do things? Can I have those action items please?

Re:Actually misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

"Come to an agreement before the meeting, and then just present the conclusions. Yes, you should still listen to objections from others in the meeting - after all, everyone's there for a reason. But you should never, ever walk have a meeting without knowing exactly who is going to say what."

Sorry, but this is an EPIC FAIL. If a decision has been made and cannot be changed you don't need a meeting, you send a memo via your medium of choice. To do otherwise is a massive waste of time and pisses people off.

Re:Actually misguided

[Matt Perry]

Meetings are not the place to hash out decisions

I couldn't disagree more. That's exactly what meetings are for -- to make decisions. If a decision has been made, you shouldn't call a meeting to announce it. Use a memo or email to communicate the results of the decision.

Re:Actually misguided

[YrWrstNtmr]

The assumption that the IM time is free and productive is a fallacy. Instead of paying for an annoying meeting for an hour a day, management is now paying for a low-level intrusion ALL DAY LONG. So while this may be an improvement, it needs to be quantified. (It may actually be a net loss of productivity.)

Oh yes. As one of the sr dev people here, I get this 'intrusion' all day long. For example:

IM from 'Mary' pops up "Hi Nightmare, are you there?"
'Yes'
"Can I ask you a question?"
'sure'
[mary is typing]...pause...[mary is typing]...pause...[mary is typing]
{for the love of FSM, mary...ask the damn question!} Eventually, she gets to the actual first level of the question
mary: "ok, but what about ...?"

After about 5 minutes of this, I get fed up and walk over to her desk. 30 seconds later, done.
But of course, 20 minutes of my concentration/mindstream is blown.

Re:Actually misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming that complex decisions can be hashed out in the time of a 30/60 minute meeting. I don't know what to tell you, other than those decisions are either trivial, or colossal failures. Meetings are there to have every one understand who is doing what, and present a forum to provide commentary.

re Get off my lawn!

[jelizondo]

Damn youngsters!

Pray tell me, where are we now going to get our free donuts?

Jeez, get off my lawn!

This'd be my boss's worst nightmare

[Skyshadow]

Man, two hours a week isn't nearly enough time for the micromanagement, pontification, self-promotion, idle chatter and general dumbfuckery that has become the mainstay of my job -- I can't see anyone in management in any serious-size company (where the most important job qualification for middle management is, of course, meetings) going for this.

My God, can you just imagine having eight hours to sink into work, unbroken by pointless meetings? Being able to concentrate on a task rather than sit in some soul-crushing little room with fluorescent lighting just to realize that your boss brought you in just so he'd have people sitting there to look impressive to some other department? Getting things done rather than listen to your coworkers discuss the specifics of your job even though they're not vaguely qualified to do so?

It'd be glorious.

Re:This'd be my boss's worst nightmare

[AnonymousClown]

Oh God! You sound like you have one of those managers that gets off on acting like a manager. Meaning, he likes the self important BS like meetings to pump up his pathetic ego. So instead of being a manager and clearing the way for you guys to actually do your jobs, he's wasting your time so that he appears to be a manager.

I had one like that years ago. He was a new supervisor on track to management - suit pants, button down shirt - no tie, tasseled shoes, drank whatever Kool-Aid that was offered by upper management, took every "leadership" and "time management" class offered, etc....

Re:This'd be my boss's worst nightmare

[poena.dare]

Worse: your boss drags you into a pointless meeting where you have no input to impress a CLIENT - and you know if you lunge across the table and plunge that letter opener into the jugular of the yammering sales rep your boss will want to have a meeting about THAT. (On the other hand, of the client likes seeing the sales rep spurt blood you could get a promotion - after the obligatory meeting, of course.)

Re:This'd be my boss's worst nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you working at I've Been to Meetings?

Re:This'd be my boss's worst nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who end up in management are Extreme Extroverts with attention spans that can only be measured in seconds, not minutes. They don't want uninterrupted time to think or get things done. They can't handle the concept of flow.

Re:This'd be my boss's worst nightmare

[cyphercell]

It's a deal. What kind of software do you sell anyways?

Re:Help! We're wasting our time Doing Stuff!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um.. Seems that the extra hours will be productively used reading /. as all here prove.

Good grief

[Moraelin]

Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work? I'm affraid that just hearing about spending 30 hours a week in meetings tops everything I've ever read in a Dilbert strip.

That gives me kind of a snarky idea, though. I've long been under the impression that most meetings (or a large part of the time allocated to them) falls basically into two categories:

- substitute for a social life (think: the boss just wants to talk to some people)

- responsibility avoidance (think: we all talked about it for hours, hence nobody is personally responsible for any given decision or lack thereof. Sorta like why they give firing squads blanks too.)

There are of course sub-categories and nuances (e.g., the crying on each other's shoulder instead of taking a decision kind of meeting, or the kind that's not just a substitute for social contact, but a one-sided occasion to brag too.) But I think that as top-leve categories, those two would account for more than half of the time wasting.

I wonder if the reduction in meeting hours just has to do with, well, if you give a lonely boss email and IRC and IM and all, he can get his socializing fix without preventing his subordinates from working in the process.

Re:Good grief

[raddan]

Well, you also need to keep in mind that certain kinds of employees should NOT be doing hands-on stuff. CEOs, for instance. A competent CEO realizes that his role is to carefully manage the division of labor to achieve the company's goals, and that's it. CEOs who get "hands on", even really smart, technically-competent ones, tend to make a mess of things, because they're not inside that problem domain regularly. If they have to know why a particular API function takes 3 parameters instead of 2, middle-management fucked up.

Re:Good grief

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work?

And that, my friend, is precisely why the cost plus contracts that fund the defense industry always run over budget and over schedule. In my experience working for big government contractors, this is precisely the common schedule of most engineers on the project, and this is precisely why nearly no work gets done.

Re:Good grief

[barzok]

Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work?

I once worked on a project where we had near-daily meetings of 60-90 minutes to discuss why we were slipping behind schedule.

I once pointed out the absurdity of it to the project manager. Her response was to schedule another meeting.

Re:Good grief

[yuhong]

On the other hand, being too out-of-touch is not a good idea either.

Re:Good grief

[lordlod]

- responsibility avoidance (think: we all talked about it for hours, hence nobody is personally responsible for any given decision or lack thereof. Sorta like why they give firing squads blanks too.)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. My last employer had a formal process of release meetings before a product was provided to a customer, all the significant players would be there, about 6-10 people. We called them "blame sharing meetings" and even wrote the minutes with that title. The concept was that everybody present had to approve of the product and everybody had to share the blame if it went terribly wrong.

The result of these was an overall improvement of quality. It also meant that someone responsible for a given section wasn't solely responsible and in line for a firing if something went wrong.

Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[netsavior]

It is hilarious/annoying as hell when you get an older "C" level executive who uses the corporate IM like this:
Bossman: Are you there?
Me: yes
*phone rings*

I usually answer their questions, which are always about *impossible to say verbally* statistics within the IM window, even while they are talking on the phone... Kind of as a way to Passive-Aggressively say "hey you know all that licensing money you pay to Microsoft for this nice IM solution? it would work better than the phone if you would just use it.

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[Anonymous Coward]

phone has less of an audit trail

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[netsavior]

which is code for "calls me all the damn time to ask the same question over and over again"

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[kangsterizer]

i'm getting that even from 30-ish ppl ;)

On the other end, they usually type slowly compared to your average slashdot reader, so even if spoken language is kind of more messy than clear black and white text, especially in the technical world, we end up resolving stuff probably faster over the phone.

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[jimicus]

Seriously, somebody would pay Microsoft for an IM solution?

Truly, the modern equivalent of "nobody got fired for buying IBM" (subtext: even if the IBM product is lousy, even if there are others which are both substantially cheaper and better).

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[Kaboom13]

If you already have a Windows environment, using AD and Exchange, it is generally easier to just pay MS their pound of flesh to use their client then bother fighting with a "free" solution. If anyone knows a free solution that can pull account and profile info from AD, server info from AD (or otherwise auto config based off the user logged in without resorting to maintenance intensive logon scripts) and support encryption, centralized logging, clients for multiple platforms, redundant servers, etc without resorting to hiring on a programmer or consultant to make some heavily customized solution (that will require more consultants to update and maintain later on) I'd very much like to hear about it. For very large organizations it would be worth it, but for most it's cheaper in the long run to just buy MS's drop in and go solution. That's assuming of course you have a Windows environment. If you don't, all bets are off.

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[keytoe]

phone has less of an audit trail

In addition to that, email and IM allow a logged 'task' to stick around longer than an ephemeral phone call. Any time I get folk on the phone who want me to do things, I always type what they're asking in an email and send it to them, any other relevant people and myself. That way I get the CYA aspect as well as a task sitting in my inbox.

Some people just don't seem capable of expressing their ideas in IM or email. I get that, and can work around it. However, I expect the same consideration in return. I'm willing to adapt to your preferences, the least you can do is make an effort to adapt to mine.

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[jimicus]

I haven't configured it, but the latest verson of jabberd2 supports GSSAPI, and hence should support Kerberos. Also supports SSL, syslog will give you centralised logging and you should easily find clients for multiple platforms.

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[ckaminski]

Not yet, but I'm writing a web version of a system based on jclaim that could do this... And open-source meebo.com, if you would.

Treat meetings like bugs . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

... a lot of bugs in a project, indicate that something ain't quite right with the project. Folks scramble to figure out what needs to be done to have less bugs. When your level of bugs go down, you got your project right again.

A lot of meetings in a project, also indicate that something ain't quite right. Instead of scheduling more meetings, folks should try to figure out why they think they need so many meetings.

Just like development is proud to say, "Hey, we have less bugs!", management should be proud to say "We have less meetings!"

Instead, when an an executive asks, "Something ain't right with your project, what y'all doin' 'bout it?"

The project manager answers, "I've scheduled a meeting with them, and a meeting with the other guys, then a meeting to talk to them foreign folks, about what 'them' and 'the other guys' think . . . ", etc.

A high number of meetings in a project should be considered a negative metric.

30 hours/week?

[Anonymous Coward]

With all those meetings, how do you get any work done? I'm glad it's gone down!

die meetings, die

[Zarf]

Informal meetings are great. Formal meetings should die. They waste time that could be saved by things like pre-recorded webinar thingies.

Re:die meetings, die

[starfishsystems]

Formal meetings are where formal decisions are made. Not everything can be done by a casual wave of the hand, you know.

Re:die meetings, die

[Zarf]

bah, I make all the formal decisions. /waves hand dismissively.

No kidding...

[IANAAC]

When I was still working in IT, the last contract job I had, I had a micro-manager from hell. He'd never held any sort of management job before, but technically was brilliant.

He needed to be in constant contact with me throughout the entire day.

I had gone down to the server room for about 45 minutes, and came back to this IM:

"ANSWER ME!!!! YOU MUST ANSWER ME! I AM YOUR MANAGER AND NEED TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!" I'm not kidding. It was that obnoxious.

Never mind the fact that we all carried around cellphones and he could have easily called me if he so desperately needed to talk to me.

It turned out that, as usual, all he wanted was a "status update" on an install I was doing. Honestly, this was more of a quite common tech-to-management role switch problem, but the fact that he had IM at his disposal just made workdays damn near unbearable.

Not necessarily

[Moraelin]

Dunno, it seems to me like when you look at the before and after, the sheer difference in hours wasted, would still make a difference by itself.

Before: 30 hours per week in meetings, not just for the berk calling all those meetings in a row, but for all the people dragged to them instead of having that time to manage their own projects or teams. If you add the time spent preparing the meetings, walking to/from meetings, etc, that doesn't leave many hours (if any at all) for anything else _but_ meetings.

Let's be generous and say they got... what? 2 hours per week left for actually doing whatever pays the company's bills? (Almost no company is paid just to hold meetings.) 4 hours?

After: 2 hours a week in meetings. Let's be generous and add another 2 for preparing, passing the minutes, going to/from the meetings, and it still leaves 36 hours to do actual work.

That's a 9 times increase or more.

Even if those people are just as inefficient as before, the sheer difference in hours wasted will make a huge difference.

Re:Not necessarily

[Hadlock]

If your job is to make decisions, maybe 30 hours a week being informed and making decisions is a good way to spend your time? Particularly if say, you work for a computer manufacturer and your boss says "ok, we're going to start up a Netbook division, and you're in charge of it. get back to me in a month and let me know what your budget is, when you expect to ship your first product, and what your division's earnings is going to be for 3rd quarter 2011."
 
However, if your job is writing testing procedures for the new netbook division, they're probably wasting your time with meetings after the first few months.

Re:Not necessarily

[Lumpy]

It's called "fucking" the salaried exempt workers...

make them do 30 hours of meetings and still get in their 40 hours of work.. Boom you got a 70 hour workweek.

I solved it by skipping most meetings and working. I left at 5pm every day and got all my stuff done.

Youth? You sure?

[thijsh]

Dr. Farnsworth: Good news everyone, I've eliminated the meeting... it only took a millennium for it to die of old age, that and your next paychecks. But long story short: naptime is over!
Hermes: Noooooooooooooooooooooo!
Fry: [wakes up] Huh, what happend?
Leela: They're trying to take away our benefits, we have to unionize to save the meeting!

Re:Help! We're wasting our time Doing Stuff!

[Thanshin]

We need to get back to the Old Ways, where we invested all of time more wisely in Talking About Doing Stuff. We fear this new fangled "work".

Actually, what we're doing right here is talking about the way of discussing how to talk about doing something.

Hmm, wait... No, it's posting about talking about how to talk about... fuck got lost again. It's talking about talking about talking about talking. Yeah, that's it.

And when meetings were a good thing ?

[unity100]

you gather numerous people in a room, either all listen and scribble while one is talking, or more than one talk in a chaos. you cant do any other work during that time, you cant take a piss, you cant eat, you cant even think properly.

online meetings are a blessing. you can still do actual work during online meetings. actually best is online chat. you dont need to talk, or you dont need to watch. people dont have to listen. you can type long blocks of text, and anyone can take their time while reading and digesting, which is something they cant do if you do it by talking. also, in most cases, telling something by voice takes longer time than typing it.

A happy medium

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had the pleasure of working on a technical team only to attend meetings for more than half the week and lose lots of valuable time that could be spent on real work. This was not very good for moral as I found myself feeling like i was not accomplishing enough and making as much progress on my work as i wanted to.

I have also recently(last 2 years) had the pleasure of working on a technical team where client facing meetings are pretty much the only meetings I have, and they are short and far between. Since this role is a remote one, I am never in communication with my management, aside from a few emails here and there. In fact, last year I only spoke to my manager 3 times on the phone, and have yet to meet him.

In my opinion, there has to be a happy medium. Face to face time is important in the workplace. It creates a link between the person doing to work and the people requesting the work. While i agree that most meetings should be kept to a minimum, there are definitely some types of meetings such as a weekly one on one with ones manager(maybe 15 minutes or so) and team meetings(maybe 30-60 minutes a few times a month) that make alot of sense to keep active and on-going. When people that work together lose a personal connection with their teammates it tends to make them less likely to go that extra step or two to help each other out. It gets even worse when it is a lack of connection between a boss and an employee.

The best example i can give to represent this disconnection between an employee and his boss(again, only talked on phone with mine 3 times last year and so far once this year) is that i recently had to have a small surgery done and despite numerous emails, preparations for time off, etc. My boss was actually surprised after my surgery when i was on my leave. It had never registered with him, even though one of those phone calls we had contained a 5 minute conversation about this very surgery and the time i would need to be out of the office following it. When there is no connection(good or bad) it becomes difficult for people to give a crap about and remember whats happening in the lives of their coworkers and thus makes the team as a whole suffer.

Using IRC/IM would do alot to bridge the gaps in my situation, as it would provide a forum for data to flow more freely. team members comments are not only helpful in seeing things in a different light, but help re-inforce what was actually said. I just think that the business world needs to remember that an extreme in any one direction is never the best solution. Dropping meetings from the schedule is great in most cases, but some personal communication face to face or at least via phone should be maintained on a regular basis so that everything keeps running smooth.

Re:A happy medium

[ckaminski]

A better solution would have been to put an "outlook appointment" in his calendar for every single day you were going to be out.

I have a remote manager now, and it's going to require a bit more extra communication between me and him to keep our relationship working. I've at least met him and we have monthly phone calls. It will probably work out as well as any of my other engagements.

My buddy telecommutes, and his new boss wanted him to come into the office once a week for a few months. He later found out that the boss thought he was slacking for working slower than everyone else in the department, until said boss figured out that my buddy is nearly completely blind. Needless to say, (ADA protections aside), they haven't given him any more grief for being 20% slower than everyone else.

The real problem ...

[khasim]

Meetings are really dick-size wars. The manager that can call the most people to a meeting obviously has the biggest dick. And if you have to attend that meeting, your dick is smaller than his.

Once you get past the need for the ego boost, you notice that meetings drop off to almost nothing. No matter what the technology used, no matter what the industry.

Re:The real problem ...

[raddan]

I work at a place that is 90% female, and where meeting attendee counts routinely run into the 20-30 range. By contrast, my own meetings (with my staff) are in the 2-3 range.

Is my dick really that small? Shoot. No wonder my wife lives on the other side of the country.

Re:The real problem ...

[Paracelcus]

"dick-size wars"

I guess they're pretty big then ;-)..

Re:The real problem ...

[mjwx]

Meetings are really dick-size wars

Not all meetings, you're entirely correct about the meetings staffed primarily by dicks of course, they are constantly measuring themselves.

As the GP said, make sure the dicks aren't there. A well planned meeting will be quite productive and generate useful work rather then everyone doing what they think they should be doing. It allows questions to be asked and answered by all involved. How many times have you asked your boss, Tom a question only to have that referred to the engineer, Adrian four hours later. In the meeting if you ask Tom about a task and he says "ask Adrian" Adrian should be able to answer that immediately, rather then tomorrow.

I dislike meetings

[gnuguru2k]

how about u?

Re:I dislike meetings

[kangsterizer]

i have one in 2 weeks, its 2h30 away from my location, and i have to actually sleep there the day before and stay the next day, i bet i'm back at like 10pm.

during the meeting i will have learned nothing that i don't already know.

what was the question again? oh yeah, meetings suck.

New Title

[Nerdfest]

Perhaps a better article title would be "How Meetings and those Who Like them are Killing Productivity".

More like

[Moraelin]

so *ahem* 30 hours of talk and 10 hours of "work"? no wonder some companies can't get shit done.

Actually, for some people it's more like 30 hours of talk and 10 hours of organizing the next meeting, preparing the powerpoint slides, and walking between meetings. Some people simply need to fill their day with something, and they'll expand it to fill all that time they need to fill.

A good manager doesn't need to.

[khasim]

If all of those are worked out ahead of time, then there shouldn't be a need for a meeting for that information to be communicated.

The only REAL need for a meeting is during a crisis that you have NOT prepared for.

no chairs at meetings

[peter303]

Best idea from Extreme Programming

If only it stayed confined to that level

[Moraelin]

Well, if it stayed confined to the level of the CEO and upper management, I wouldn't even have anything about it. The problem is that the culture of meetings _does_ tend to extend downwards to the level of those guys programming the netbooks.

For a start each of those managers who get dragged to fill someone's 15-20 person meeting, in turn will fill their time with dragging other groups of 15-20 persons into meetings of their own. And then come the corporate structures often overimposed over the normal pyramid, so the same guy not only ends up telling his boss about what a Netbook can do, but also do the same in the architecture meetings, strategy meetings, controlling meetings, budget meetings, meetings to convince the Mordac The Preventer Of Information Services from the IT department why he needs XA transactions activated in the database, etc.

I've actually seen companies where basically even the guy who's technically just in charge of 3 other guys writing the GUI for some Web front-end, ends up spending half of his week in meetings.

Re:If only it stayed confined to that level

[Hadlock]

Some people are redundant and have to look busy. I would imagine Tom Smykowski spends 30 hrs a week in meetings looking important, pulling an office wellfare paycheck. Office Space illustrates this exceedingly well! http://www.llakomy.com/Projects/flashvideo/office-space/tom-smykowski-s-interview-with-bobs/view
 
Wally from Dilbert is another prime example of this.

In schools, at least mine, meetings suck much less

[TromboonDotPy]

I'm a teacher in a public high school with (we think) better than average utilization of our information tech, at least on the teacher's desk. We take a LOT less meetings than 5 years ago, and the meetings we have are MUCH more abstract, more based on principles, overviews of our goals, and a bit of cheerleading, and SHORTER than back in the day. I totally commend my bosses for their tech-awareness, and their use of meeting times only for things that can't easily be said in email, or a video.

The exceptions are sort of interesting. The state mandated test regime requires a lengthy, plodding, punitive-feeling training session. Technology training. also a state mandate, is required to be administered by means of face-time. Basically, the theater of authority seems to require face-time: "I can make you show up and listen to me."

Perhaps this is what is really going on in meetings in the private sector, as well?

IM sucks ... so 90s ... no longer used here ...

[vlm]

Here we used to use IM internally, until it was ruined. We generally, no longer use IM.

Other folks figured out they can try to skip procedures by using IM. You know all those procedures? F those procedures we'll just send an IM to some random person, that's the new procedure.

A lot of complaining about our work schedules in a 24x7 department. Why, I never reported it because so-and-so was on vacation so I couldn't IM him. What about the three guys sitting there doing nothing? Well, they're not in my buddy list.

"Phone Book" problems. People whom transfer to other depts but keep their name getting IMs to work their old job.

Also internal scheduling became intolerable. IM worked OK for folks whom only do one task all day every day. Special projects became impossible when other individuals started managing our incoming workload.

Documentation becomes impossible. Stuff that belongs in a wiki procedure is just IMed by those too lazy to edit. Stuff that belongs on the calendar is just IMed by folks too lazy to use outlook. Stuff that belongs in a ticket is just IMed by those too lazy to use RT. The lazy people made life hell on the non-lazy people.

Collaboration? Impossible. You can email any arbitrary group of folks. IM? In any group of three workers, they'll try to cut and paste each other, but fail.

Then there's the freaks. Such a broad spectrum of responsiveness. Some folks treat it like an email, as long as they reply by the end of the day, its all good. Then there's the lunatics whom expect a response within 1 second or else you're snubbing them, obviously the universe revolves around them and how dare you imply it doesn't, by not dropping everything to reply to their IM (lots of that type in lower level mgmt)

Finally no audit trail. I IMed someone whom never did what I asked. Turns out that's someone at a meeting, away from desk, whatever. Just lost in the aether.

After enough complaints, each individual got rid of it as their threshold was reached. Very few people indeed still use IM where I work.

IM kills meetings too

[adenied]

By the headline I thought this might be about people using IM during meetings killing things. I tend to agree that having multi-hour meetings usually is pretty useless. If you really have that much information that needs to be shared chances are no one in your audience can absorb it all in a long tedious non-interactive meeting.

OTOH, I hope people don't try to take this as "we can do everything without face to face interaction!" This is also problematic. I work with a number of people who live far away and only come into the office every few weeks. We work pretty well over the interwebs but the couple days we get for face to face interaction is invaluable.

Back to my first thought, when you do have to be in a meeting and bring a laptop, just don't bury yourself in IMing with other people, checking e-mail, etc. It's distracting and I really hate it when someone has to repeat a question because someone was reading the latest Slashdot headlines. It's a level of inconsiderateness that shouldn't be found in a professional environment. That said, if I called a meeting and it seems useless to you, tell me!

My action item...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that every single decision made in the meeting must have an associated "next action" assigned to somebody. Otherwise, there's no point in making that decision.

My action item from this meeting is to machine-gun everyone who wasted my time with this crap.

--The Columbine Boys, Out on Work-Release

Me, I turn it all off.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

For at least three hours a day, I try to turn off my IM client and ignore my email. If I don't, I am not able to get enough focused effort on any one task in order to get things done.

The problem with replacing face-to-face with IMs and emails is that you turn what should be a few short meetings into long, drawn-out discussions that can continue pulling attention away for hours.

Re:Me, I turn it all off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here except I turn off my IM and email for 3 to 6 months at a time. I really truly hated working in an office.

Re:Me, I turn it all off.

[c-reus]

It is not that easy to do that in a distributed working environment (I mean people in different cities, countries, timezones). Not answering the e-mails and IMs for three hours can quickly escalate to having to explain your boss that you do not have problems with communicating with other people. Especially in cases where you are working at a different location than your boss.

Re:Me, I turn it all off.

[Anonymous Coward]

For at least three hours a day, I try to turn off my IM client and ignore my email. If I don't, I am not able to get enough focused effort on any one task in order to get things done.

The problem with replacing face-to-face with IMs and emails is that you turn what should be a few short meetings into long, drawn-out discussions that can continue pulling attention away for hours.

After the 3 other hours per day that you spend on /. and other online time-wasters (facebook, fark, etc), and the hour or so you take for lunch, that leaves you with what, an hour of actual work time! Well done!

Maybe you could hold a meeting to discuss this

[roguegramma]

Maybe you could hold a meeting to discuss your plan of more efficient meetings because of IM.

And it's supposed to work the other way, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason I tend to push back against that mentality is that it's supposed to go in both directions, and it never does. If I have to work 60 hours a week to get something done, and I'm expected to do that, then it should also be perfectly acceptable for me to only put in 20 hours a week if that's all it takes me to get my work done.

But that's never how it works in practice. I'd honestly rather just get paid by the hour. Salaried employment is a rigged game wherein, economically, the employee always loses.

Re:And it's supposed to work the other way, too.

[h4rr4r]

Then you are a sucker. I have a meeting on Tuesdays that makes me come in early, so I leave early on Mondays.

The purpose of meetings

[Anonymous Coward]

The purpose of meetings is to get management out of the way so the rest of us can get some work done.

And the point??

[tomservo84]

"meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week."

And this is written as if it is a BAD thing.

Something tells me this isn't going to work out.

[bynary]

Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective

I'm not quite sure, but this seems to imply that 'meeting-full' management was effective. I will argue tooth and nail that the opposite is true. What I've found to be effective has been hands-off managers that move heaven and earth to make sure their people can get their jobs done quickly and efficiently. They don't buy into any single management methodology but instead adapt as the situation requires them to. If a meeting is necessary, they call a meeting. They don't force new tools or methods on you but instead ask if there are problems with current tools and methods and make sure those problems get corrected. Lead by serving.

"Whom" called - it wants its proper usage back

[Anonymous Coward]

"Whom" refers to the object.

"Who" refers to the subject.

"People who transfer."

"People to whom a transfer is made."

This entire thread

[slyrat]

Is actually just like some meetings.
We are just complaining about meetings and wasting time.
After reading enough of this it feels in some ways like being in a meeting.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Even we OLD folks get it

[kilodelta]

I've been in IT for close to 20 years. Meetings are the most unproductive time wasters ever.

With email, instant messaging, intranets, web 2.0, dotProject and a zillion other like tools there really isn't much need for meetings.

Even when I've been an I.T. Director I rarely had formalized meetings. Information transfer happened in discrete gatherings maybe two or three times a quarter, and for less than 10 minutes each. Email and other networking technologies suffice.

Wow, talk about inefficient

[ducomputergeek]

We have one long meeting at the end of each month where we're usually planning what feature to work on during the next month. And a lot of that meeting time is just assigning tasks and addressing any upfront concerns and is usually about an hour to two hours tops if we're adding a major feature. Then I keep track of the developers via their commit comments. I tell them put the status in there in less than 2 sentences. My only rule is that if they are having a problem let me know about it.

If I see a problem in a recent build, I file a bug report. It works extremely well.

Re:In schools, at least mine, meetings suck much l

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr Obvious: Hello Caller. Welcome to the Mr Obvious show. Do you have a question?
Caller: Hello Mr. Obvious. Long time listener, first time caller
Mr. Obvious: Well welcome to the show caller. What's your question?
Caller: Basically, the theater of authority seems to require face-time: "I can make you show up and listen to me."
Caller: Perhaps this is what is really going on in meetings in the private sector, as well?
Mr. Obvious: Next caller please

Beware of false prophets

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience the only thing that wastes more time than meetings is people complaining to each other about how there are too many meetings.

The word "meeting"...

[grumpyman]

...have a pretty bad connotation. People defined 'meeting' as any occasion that involves more than 1 person. Some of these so-called 'meetings' are actually the 'tasks' themselves, because in carrying out certain task or deliverables, it requires more than 1 person (i.e. a meeting???). For some people, 'meeting' is part of the major job function. E.g. Business analysts -> they're supposed to work users to gather requirements (meeting?), facilitates between stakeholders and developers (meetings?), work with PM (more meetings???), and time in typing up the stuff (non-meeting), and reviewing those materials (meetings again!?)...etc. One cannot claim that these people just wasted time on 'meetings' and not actually work.

Oblig:

[mujadaddy]

"No, no, it's German. It says "The Meetings, The."

"No one who speaks German could be bad!"

Re:SKYPE

[petit_robert]

Nice idea, but the stakes are not the same in a discussion on /. and in the board room of an SNP500 company.

This reminds me of an acquaintance who had some contacts with the French secret services, and started a newsgroup for them. This was around 97 or so.

Since nobody could reasonably post anything meaningful (for obvious reasons), it quickly died.

What the fuck?

[euxneks]

Someone wants to make meetings longer? What the fuck is wrong with their head?

Planners vs workers

[YrWrstNtmr]

For planners, having a meeting is work. For workers, having a meeting takes away from work.
Unfortunately, the planner seems to be in between the worker and the customer/end user.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:SKYPE

[ckaminski]

Dude, have you SEEN the things people talk about in forums?

icanhascheezburger.com for one. snopes.com could probably start one pretty easily. diet websites, sewing websites, auto websites.

People LOVE forums, they love to talk to share to be heard. We (/. community) are not unique in this regard.

The difficulty in doing it for a company is interest, keeping it relevant, and getting meaningful content, as well as letting people feel they have a say. That's not true in most places. usually it's top-down mandates.

What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need social bonding with your team, then go out to lunch with them. Sheesh

Otherwise, most "corporate" meetings serve to give certain people to flap their lips and say a whole lot of nothing while making themselves feel useful and important.

Re:SKYPE

[Lorens]

What I personally find to be missing from communications is something LIKE slashdot, or Digg, or Reddit, etc for large organizations.

There's Yammer. (www.yammer.com) "Enterprise Microblogging"