Meetings

The last week has been too busy for much blogging, so … some catching up.

One thing that caught my eye a while back was David Heinemeier's (37 Signals) posting about meetings ― and their frequent lack of value. A nod of recognition here to Mike's magic beans send-up of this, but I do believe that many meetings are a waste of time: they're often held out of a sense of what's required (the due process) and are often allowed to run for far too long and with too little purpose. I like David's bulletpoints contra meetings:

• They break your working day into small, incoherent pieces on a schedule incompatible with the natural breaks in your flow
• They are normally all about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or a screen of design)
• They usually contain an abysmal low amount of information conveyed per minute
• They often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense
• They drift off subject easier than a rear-wheel driven Chicago cab in heavy snow
• They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what its about
• They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway

David linked back to a Guardian article (which appeared in January), reporting on research conducted by Alexandra Luong and Steven G Rogelberg and published (March 2005) in the journal, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice. The summary of the report on the APA Journals site runs:

Meetings are an integral part of organizational life; however, few empirical studies have systematically examined the phenomenon and its effects on employees. By likening work meetings to interruptions and daily hassles, the authors proposed that meeting load (i.e., frequency and time spent) can affect employee well-being. For a period of 1 week, participants maintained daily work diaries of their meetings as well as daily self-reports of their well-being. Using hierarchical linear modeling analyses, the authors found a significant positive relationship between number of meetings attended and daily fatigue as well as subjective workload (i.e., more meetings were associated with increased feelings of fatigue and workload).

The Guardian article was by Marc Abrahams. (He edits the Annals of Improbable Research and organises the Ig Nobel Prize.) It's an amusing read about something we all know is true, even if the "experiment" conducted by Luong and Rogelberg seems to have used such a tiny number of subjects as to look like a good example of 'improbable research'. 37. (37? Is there a joke running here …?)

In my experience, people who put faith in meetings often rate process over the messiness of practice. This is a good place for me to bookmark Ross' initial post, The End of Process, Euan's comment there (which he also posted afterwards, here) and Euan's excellent, later posting, More on process.

By the way: most of last week was not spent in meetings, and the two conferences I attended (I'll post about these shortly) were certainly not a waste of time.

Technorati tags: meetings, organisations, GTD, process