One Less Meeting Gets You Home in Time for Dinner, Time Management : iPedia

A client of mine absolutely loved to have meetings. Regardless of the topic, if there was some reason for at least two people to have any kind of interaction a meeting got called. Not only were there a lot of meetings but there would almost always be superfluous bodies taking up space in the meeting that had no real reason to be there other than to be “informed.” Now, if decisions got made and things got done I would have had more tolerance for the meeting mania. But more often than not litt

A client of mine absolutely

...click on link for more information and related articles.

love

As a senior manager, I could have spent every working hour of every day in meetings. Me needing to meet with other managers or my staff. Vendors wanting to meet with me. Meeting with customers. Meeting with other organizations. Meetings to decide what meetings to have or not have. It was meeting after meeting after meeting. I had to actively control my calendar to say no to meetings that didn’t make sense, push back on meetings where I didn’t need to be there or where we could get work done through other means.

As much as I may grouse about meetings, some of them were necessary, beneficial and effective. Then again, there were those that were a total waste of time and could have been accomplished by some other means. The million dollar question then becomes, “How do you keep the beneficial meetings and eliminate the wastes of time?” In my experience, there are several situations where meetings are generally more appropriate than doing through other means, as follows:

Getting buy-in or consensus on a strategy, direction, or decision – Meet if you’ve got something that requires people being 100% bought in to the solution. For people to be truly bought in, they need to have an opportunity to influence direction, express concerns, or provide alternatives.

Team building – If you want your team to work better together then they need meeting time to get to know each other, to understand relative strengths and weaknesses, and to want to help each other.

Celebrating a success or milestone – Having an e-party just doesn’t work. Let your folks get together for a milkshake and celebrate a successful completion of a project, meeting a critical milestone, or celebrating a

Love is a condition or phenomenon of emotional primacy, or absolute value. Love generally includes an emotion of intense attraction to either another person, a place, or thing; and may also include the aspect of caring for or finding identification with those objects, including self-love. Love can describe an intense feeling of affection, an emotion or an emotional state. In ordinary use, it usually refers to interpersonal love, an experience usually felt by a person for another person. Love is commonly considered impossible to define.
...click on link for more information and related articles.

holiday.

Delivering bad news where people will likely have questions – No one likes to find out bad news by reading a memo. If you’ve got bad news that will affect people directly, get them in a room if logistically possible and deliver the message. It gives people an opportunity to interact as well as it being a more humane and sensitive way of delivering bad news.

What are some effective alternatives to people getting in a room together to meet? Try these on for size:

E-mail – Great for dissemination of

The word holiday has related but different meanings in English-speaking countries. Based on the words holy and day, holidays originally represented special religious days. The word has evolved in general usage to mean any special day of rest (as opposed to regular days of rest such as the weekend).
...click on link for more information and related articles.

information and for some decision making that may not be contentious or controversial. Just watch for when a topic does turn contentious or controversial; you’re best to take the discussion offline and get a meeting together for the relevant parties to discuss.

Web sites – Also great for dissemination of information or for getting input

Audio/

Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.

Many people speak about the Information Age as the advent of the Knowledge Age [citation needed] or knowledge society, the information society, and information technologies, and even though information science and computer
...click on link for more information and related articles.

video conferencing – Effective when logistics prevent people from physically meeting or when a person only wants to listen in on a meeting

Electronic mail, abbreviated e-mail or email, is a method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term e-mail applies both to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and to intranet systems allowing users within one company to email each other. Often these workgroup collaboration organizations may use the Internet protocols for internal e-mail service.
...click on link for more information and related articles.

We need to interact, we need to exchange information, and we need to work together to get things done. Avoid falling into meeting trap and consciously ask yourself if there are other ways to communicate and get your point across.

Lonnie Pacelli has over 20 years' experience with Accenture and

A website (or Web site, according to Associated Press guidelines) is a collection of Web pages, typically common to a particular domain name or subdomain on the World Wide Web on the Internet.
...click on link for more information and related articles.

Microsoft and is currently president of Leading on the Edge™ International. Lonnie's books include "The Project Management Advisor: 18 Major Project Screw-Ups and How to Cut Them Off at the Pass" and "The Truth About Getting Your Point Across". Get the books, leadership products, other articles, MP3 seminars and a free email mini seminar at http://www.leadingonedge.com

The Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of US$39.79 billion and 63,564 employees in 102 countries and regions. It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices.[4][2] Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, its most popular products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software, each of which has achieved near-ubiquity in the desktop computer market. Microsoft possesses footholds in other m
...click on link for more information and related articles.

Digg this article.

One Less Meeting Gets You Home in Time for Dinner

Other articles