Why long and often meetings at business are toxic.

This is why I think meetings are toxic:

• We discuss about abstract concepts, not the real things.
  
  
• Vague agenda in meeting is a real time killer
  
  
• Most of the meetings are easily drifted to off-topic.
  
  
• Meetings convey a small amount of information/per minute. Here I am considering man minutes(as like man hours). example: 5 people are present in a meeting of 60 minutes, then its (5*60) 300 minutes.
  
• Mostly meetings has a moron who wastes time of others for sake of his opinion.
  
• There are many more.
  
  

                                     

source: linkedin

• We never schedule a meeting for 6 minutes. We schedule a meeting of 30 minutes or for an hour. This is how a meeting scheduling software works(we never set a meeting of 6 minutes from google calendar or outlook). Meetings more often scheduled like TV shows.
  
  
• And if we only need 6 minutes to achieve a goal then why to stretch this to 30 minutes. And in fact it's not just 30 minutes It's 30*n, where n is number of people involved in that meeting.
  
• One of the most stupid things I see during meeting is about late comers. In a group of 10, 2 people comes late by 15 minutes, then  it's a clear cut waste of 2 more hours. How stupid it is.
  

Meeting procreate, One meeting leads to 2nd then to 3rd and so on..

                                           

source: blog.pgi

I want to share one of an eye-opening incidence on a planned meeting and how it was a productivity killer. Still most of the the people didn't realize.

I work for a mid size company(~180) spread across globe, mostly in India. Once there was a town-hall in my company in the Delhi office. It was scheduled for 2 hours and around 60 people participated to this. Whenever a meeting of this kind is called off, the calculation gets started in my mind. So, on that day calculation was like:

Number of people:60

Duration of meeting: 2 hrs

Total number of hours = 60*2 =120 man hours

And on that particular day, speaker-mic devices were not tested properly and it took another 30 minutes to fix that. So, another (60*0.5) 30 hours.

So, now total number of hours = 120 +30 = 150 man hours.

Context switching from work to meeting and then again back to work also adds at-least 15-20% of time to total time.

So, now grand total number of hours = 150+150*0.20 = 180 hrs.

Before and after this town-hall, an email was sent to everyone for the agenda and other interesting outcome. It also took 30 minutes of individual(this time including context switching).

SO, now grand grand total number of hours =  180 + 60*0.5 = 210

Then, I went back and thought about this. Was it really worth spending so many billable hours for this activity. It could have been communicated to everyone on emails or on notice boards or some video of 30 minutes could have been created and shared. Still not sure, what could have been the best media to communicate. 

And if this meeting was required to be done in in-person, we could have done this meeting at morning with all devices tested first and least context switching. It could have helped us reducing grand grand number of hours to (150 hrs or less).

                                

source: media.licdn

Do we really require meetings???

• Sometimes, may be we require a meeting. We should judge this by the cost of the meeting. Most of the time outcome of the meeting comes to be liability instead of an asset.
• Take a call basis on critical, urgency and other factors of a task. If it can be avoided, then try to avoid it.

And if it's can't be avoided, then try to stick to:

• Keep clear agenda.
• Invite as few people as possible.
• Start on time.
• Begin with problem statement.
• Set a time and close meeting  when it rings.
• End meetings with solution not with other meetings.

I hope, this might help many people in deciding if a meeting is really required or not. And if required, how can it be made efficient.

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