Long and Short Meetings

What was the longest meeting you've ever attended?

(mine: 5 hours @ a church council mtg once a month...thankfully, not at the current church I serve!)

What was the most effective meeting you've ever attended?

(mine: 45 min @ a youth mtg to chart out service ideas and actions)

When you compare the two, did you notice how preparation, focus and input ahead of time affected the length of the meeting?  How?

Death by Meeting!  That's what Patrick Lencioni's fable concludes: that we're killing ourselves by meetings all day long.  My experience of meetings is that they turn out to be all talk and no action.  This is very frustrating to try to get things done.

I came across a post by Seth Godin re: meetings and how to make them more effective and productive.

Some takeaways from Seth's post:

1. Schedule meeting in incriments of 5 minutes: this would be interesting to try out.  It would force us to keep the meeting moving, not get bogged down on one item, and cover items succinctly.  It would also force people to be prepared.  If you find it hard to share everything in 5 minutes, check out the book Say It In Six!

(Well, of course the book shows you how to share your thoughts within 6 minutes and with a 5 minute timeframe, you'll have to really hone your skills!  But you get the idea...)

2. Remove all chairs: I've heard of this and have tried it a couple of times with great success!

3. Short Email summary: I take this to the next level and use Google docs with my teams.  Every member of the team can interact and add their progress and thoughts on a project.  The doc can be easily accessed by anyone else on the team.  Then, when it comes time for the meeting, all the thoughts and ideas have been posted and the meeting can go beyond the initial "idea-share" and getting to the action of "how are we going to proceed?" During the meeting, the doc is updated in real time based on our conversation.  Ideally, though, I'd love to jump on Comapping so that it gives my team an accurate picture of how our brains process information.