Angel and Tiggs

It’s a necessity more than a personal request. They’re just not actionable. It doesn’t matter how companies call them, update meetings are time-wasting and fruitless corporate waste. I’ve been going through them since 2000. The net result of benefits minus cons has been negative 9 out of 10 times. Think about it. Let’s say the room is filled with 8-10 people and these meetings are scheduled for an hour every two weeks. I know sometimes they happen every week, which is even more overkill. I’m trying to keep our spirits uplifted for a few minutes.

Ask yourself:

• What do you get by listening to your peers talk about things they did in the past week or two?
• How many of their projects are you really involved with? This makes a difference on your level of interest engagement.
• Do you talk about specific next steps? Do you track if those next steps have been accomplished?
• What is desired outcome of the meeting?
• Do people take notes?
  • If yes, what happens after the meeting is over?
  • How many people actually use the notes for further follow-up?
• Does everybody participate, or just a few “leaders” chime in?
• Do people respect the time assigned to them? One hour for 10 people means an average of 6 minutes a person, assuming everybody

Suggestions to eliminate group meetings:

• Project Management approach: Create or use a project management tool. There are hundreds (literally) of cloud/web-based tools that can enter project information, details, measure progress, allow collaboration and whatnot.
• Assign one manager to track down each project’s process and make sure peers are accountable for entering their project information on a regular basis. After a while, people will get the gist of it and function without reminders.
• Most importantly: if you need to follow up on anything, pick up the phone or walk to your colleague’s desk. If you two can’t figure things out in 10 minutes, then think about booking more time.
• Scrum: do 15-20-minute group scrums, once a week. Every person has 90-120 seconds to summarize answers to three questions: What did I work on since our last update? What’s next? Do I need help from anybody? Take everything offline to an informal chat if requested, followed up by a 30-minute meeting with the people relevant to that project, only if strictly necessary.

Whoever is running the show, please spare me at least one hour every 2 weeks. It may sound like little time to do things, but for my own mental health and extreme productivity desire, I’d like to more efficiently use that hour.

I said “Please” this time.