Meetings, what a waste of time!

Meetings can become a true waste of time. They actually are quite useless most of the time in today's corporations but they are constantly there an take a huge amount of our time.

A manager needs to keep the below in mind at all times:

1- Do not attend a meeting if you can deal with the matter in any other way and more productively.
2- When you attend a meeting ensure the existence of a structure in conduct of the meeting, it must include a brief introduction of the topic, the people present and what possibly is being targeted to be achieved.
3- Ensure you know what the meeting is about buy requesting a brief description from the organizer and always go to a meeting that has an agenda. Avoid meetings without an agenda completely.
4- Have your clear agenda and reason for attending  the meeting. Make sure you know what you want to achieve.
5- Ensure action items, actionees and deadlines are recorded.
6- Avoid long meetings.
7- Avoid regular meetings.
8- Avoid meetings with too many participants. More than 3 or 4 people is usually too many.

Feel free to add to this list in the comments.

Meetings are not new, they have been around at least for as long as businesses have been around and they same essential problems have existed. And the productivity issues with regards to them never go irrelevant. I found the below book which is from at least over 20 years ago very useful. It proposes a structured way for conducting meetings that ensures a much better level of productivity by ensuring achievement of results and making better decisions in meetings.

Email Agony

As a manager of a team of, say, 30 staff, you are included in numerous email communications. The communications can fall into the below categories:

1- Genuine email for your action that no one else can perform (maybe less than 10%)
2- Inquiries about the team scope and activities (around 20%)
3- Carbon copied in communication with team members (around 70%)

Reading some 200 emails per day and sorting it out for the possible 10% that requires your attention is certainly not what you are to spend your day on. The worse thing about checking emails constantly is that it is addictive and can take control of your life. If you have a blackberry, the situation can become easily dangerous for your health. While you are online with your email you can hardly concentrate on anything else and as a result cannot perform the core parts of the managerial activities like planning, and innovation.

A solution could be:

• Use email filters as smartly as possible to do the sorting out automatically.
• Limit the time during the day for checking emails to specific hours, and do not use your peak morning hours for emails.
• Trust your staff in that they will take care of the work independently, and spend your time rather on developing them to do so.
• Choose only the very necessary emails to respond to.

Some other ideas that could be tested are:

• Use auto reply for responding to frequent inquiries.
• Introduce focal points for activities and share their email addresses in your auto-reply
• Request inclusion of the word "escalation" in the email title, if the request is important enough that cannot wait for a day. Then you can have it sorted out in a specific folder to which you pay attention during other hours of the day outside your email hours.

Please, put a comment if you have successfully experienced other methods to deal with emails effectively and efficiently, or drop me an email for a more comprehensive thought.