Who hasn’t wasted tons of time in meetings? Meetings are a joke in all organizations, and the joke is always the same - they are meaningless wastes of time. I’ve heard the sweet promises of things like Scrum, pomodoros, people slapping you in the face when you open Facebook all as means to reduce waste in the workplace. The thing is, none of them are nearly as damaging as meetings.

The reason we have meetings are noble ones, but misguided in their attempts to solve a problem. Short of a masquerade for some political agenda, meetings have a singular purpose: share information. Information sharing is hard and how many of us are just awesome at writing documentation constantly? How about grooming that documentation and making sure it’s well organized? As a result, people are left out of the loop. They want to form a meeting so they can ask questions and get people nodding heads on the path forward. The problem is that even with meeting notes, real documentation hasn’t been made. The information exchanged in a meeting is transient to the members of the meeting, and even then only to their recollection. Meeting notes without context are meaningless, and meeting notes don’t really contribute to a growing knowledge base - they are a log more than anything. Someone kept minutes.

If you had to run your organization for the next month with no meetings, what would you do? How would you run the organization differently if you had to cancel all meetings for a month? The overarching theme with meetings is someone didn’t have documentation in the right place, current, adequate, or existing at all.

The call to arms needs to be to stop having meetings. Anytime someone wants to create a meeting, be it in a meeting room or some informal gathering, instead push that off to documentation or some kind of forum. Make sure there’s a written log so others can go back an see what was exchanged in the first place. How did you all arrive at that conclusion? Did you try X or Y? The log should capture that. Instead of someone writing down all of that stuff, why not move the meeting into a place where documents can be commented against? All of this sounds like a great use case for a wiki or some service such as Google Docs. Collaboration tools are essential here. If you do searching around on the internet for a bug you can typically find someone reporting the problem, see attempts that were made and discussions as to why the bug is a tricky one and how it might be solved. OSS has this nailed down because you can’t have meetings. You can’t have long email chains. Instead just comment on some post somewhere so there’s a permanent record that’s searchable by everyone and not just people who treat their email like a really bulky chat log with no assurance of consistency, sortability, or continuity.

If you can push for a no-meeting day I suggest pushing for a no meeting week next. Try to make it your organization’s culture to not have them, because they destroy productivity worse than any other issue in a typical organization. Comminucation can be had, but not on a schedule and not where everyone has to sit on their hands verbally creating documentation that is then immediately destroyed.