where you thought, upon leaving, that that was, without doubt, the most constructive use of your time?

Just curious…

That will never happen, its like getting a flat on hot summer evenings next to a decent pub 😉

Absolutely. I used to get fed up having discussions with folk who would change their minds at a whim and hadn’t discussed anything with other interested parties. Getting everyone in a room and thrashing it out is often by far the best means of making progress. You just need the skills to make it happen – or acquire the services of a good facilitator.

Very few in comparison to the volume of meetings I have been to!

Binners, are you at work right now? Complaining about wasting time?

If I feel I have nothing to add not gain from a meeting I make my excuses and leave. So in the majority, the meetings I attend are a constructive use of my time.

What is the point in sitting trough something that is wating your time, never understood where people moan about attending meetings when they have been pointless ones. Walk out

From a former senior Googlist, the culture at Google is against rubbish meetings:

* If you come to a meeting and don’t think you can contribute, you can walk out

* If there is no agenda, you can walk out

* If there’s no objective to the meeting, you can walk out

* If you think the meeting’s pointless, you can walk ut

I’m liking it a great deal. Cuts down on the number of extraneous meetings. Side effect: alienates meeting jobsworths. This may be a good or bad thing.

Yes.

The key to good meetings ,is make them short and supply quality biscuits.
Our section would be chaos without our weekly meeting. 🙂

Yes

But I couldn’t have been more wrong

Its not a complaint, its a genuine inquiry?

I’ve just got out of a meeting where out of 3 hours, I knew that about maybe 5 or 10 minutes would have been relevant to me. And I’m wondering if this is the case in other peoples experience?

like getting a flat on hot summer evenings next to a decent pub

Once stopped on the Chase on a hot summer evening to help a very attractive young lady get her bike going.

Best puncture I’ve ever fixed

It’s about a 90:10 split. 90% are useless, pointless wastes of time. A few contain real work. Doesn’t mean I enjoy any of them.

when you work in a business where time is literally money, internal meetings tend to be very focused.
working with corporate clients, it is amazing how some organisations have their office-based employees in meetings literally all of the time. when do they do their actual work, or are they all just middle-management middle-men who “project manage” stuff?

I’ve just got out of a meeting where out of 3 hours, I knew that about maybe 5 or 10 minutes would have been relevant to me. And I’m wondering if this is the case in other peoples experience?

Agree, but often you need to be there for the full 3 hours so folk don’t make ‘bad’ decisions – and would you have known which 5-10 minutes beforehand?

Try taking your mobile in with you, then start googling stuff…
This happens quite a lot at meetings I attend, oh yes it does. I found it quite odd at first but seems to be the culture where I am at present.
I’ve yet to succumb but on occasion I wish I had.
Thing is, most meetings I attend are actually specific importance with the Project I’m on, I’m a squirrel on information gathering and finding out stuff, so few meetings have been a TWoT

I once flew to the Isle of Man for a pre-contract meeting which it was ‘critical’ that I attend, only to be asked for our site supervisor’s mobile number and to email across a copy of our method statement when I got chance. This was at 10am with my flight back at 4pm. Cue driving the TT circuit (great fun in an underpowered diesel hire car), various cafe stops and lots of reading the bits of paper I don’t bother with.

Doesn’t often happen in the NHS, that.

Increasingly, yes. Mainly because I have better things to do than get stuck in worthless meetings.

I’m very in favour of the Google approach (I believe also seen in organisations like Walmart).

You have to learn how to give good meeting. I rarely go to anything that doesn’t have a published agenda and somebody chairing, that’s almost guaranteed to get nowhere.

The trick is to get your bit early on the agenda then excuse yourself for an urgent phone call/pick up the kids etc, and make sure somebody sends you the minutes.

Using your mobile at meetings is the height of rudeness, I ended one once as a couple of techie guys were doing that.

Our daily stand ups are always useful, means that everyone know what everyone on the team is doing, where resources are needed and all that.

We’re a bloody long way from being properly agile but i’m liking it so far!

Useless meetings last month involved an entire days sprint planning the other side of europe where i was assigned… the same user stories i’d had last sprint due to them being blocked, then another days ‘work’ there that was entirely pointless bar about 5 mins in the morning that meant i’d missed the next flight home.

I think if I was in a meeting and someone was googling on their phone, I’d throw something solid at their head

I’m liking the Google approach

As it happens, with regard to todays meeting – previously our entire dept was required to attend. This week we’ve managed to convince the powers that be that it would be time better spent, if just one of us showed up, then filled the others in on relevant stuff afterwards. This has taken some serious convincing though

make sure somebody sends you the minutes

another waste of time

Using your mobile at meetings is the height of rudeness, I ended one once as a couple of techie guys were doing that.

I do client training sometimes and was amazed at one client where the majority of the people being trained spent half of their time looking at their laptops doing other things. Your money you’re wasting and feel free to pay me some more when you realise you don’t know what you’re doing.

Meeting with no agenda is a social gathering.
Our time is money so agendas tend to be formed as a list of questions with a space for answers and by whom, by when columns.

Worked for one of the early quangos where it seemed that I existed purely to attend pre-meeting meetings, meetings, wash-up meetings and all points in between.

Fortunately our new approach leaves more time to read STW. 😀

When the clock was running at hundreds of quid an hour, people tended to only invite me to meetings/onto calls whenever it was necessary, and boot me off as soon as possible. Those meetings were generally useful from my perspective.

Now that I’m not fee earning, I seem to end up in a whole raft of meetings about stuff I don’t understand. I’ve been exposed to a whole world of meetings about meetings and people who spend more time trying to organise meetings than they do actual work.

I rarely go into a meeting without my laptop, so I can at least do something productive, like post on STW.

I did have one job, for a national organisation with a three-letter acronym, in which meetings were the most fruitful part of my day. Two reasons:

1) Access to tea and custard creams
2) Over-generous mileage expenses for travelling halfway across the county for most of them

I like the meetings where a lot of time is taken up discussing/sorting out where/when the next meeting will happen.

One manager I had used to make a big point about how I should attend meetings in her place as part of her delegating things to her managers and not being a detail mongering control freak, developing her staff etc yeah great excellent, which meant I had to sit through an hour of us her telling me exactly what to do and say in each meeting in response to each agenda point, then report back, so I had to waste 3 times the time of each meeting to make her look good, and she would still phone the relevant head of function (who she had just insulted by sending an underling so nothing was proper decided anyway) to make sure I had stuck to the program.

It can become an industry !! Especially if crazy people are involved.

I used to work for a very large company who would fly people from Edinburgh to London on a monthly basis to go through the accounts despite every single site they operated from being plugged into the central offices’ finance system. This happened irrespective of good bad or indifferent results.

Im probably in the unusual position of wanting more meetings. Two years at one workplace, millions of dollars of projects, and we have never had one team or office meeting, no one knows wtf anyone is doing, morale is low, new colleagues haven’t been introduced…

I rarely go into a meeting without my laptop, so I can at least do something productive, like post on STW.

I’m often the only attendee without a laptop. It’s the meeting equivalent of going ready for a bare-knuckle fight, rather than regulation boxing….

Oh hell yes, if anyone has experience of rolling out over 8,000 laptops to mind numbingly stupid people, meetings like that regularly crop up.

And if another f—er pipes up to ask who “owns that action”, I’ll kill them.

We all do, muppets, and if you aren’t intelligent enough to work out that’s what you do, or what I do or what the finance guy does, then you probably should have asked a parent or guardian to come along with you. FFS.

We all do, muppets, and if you aren’t intelligent enough to work out that’s what you do, or what I do or what the finance guy does, then you probably should have asked a parent or guardian to come along with you. FFS.

he he 🙂

My favourite is when people decide to offer their opinion on legal issues. Normally followed with me suggesting how the use of pastel colours could greatly improve their site drawings.

yes, meetings which resulted in job offers !

I’ve sometimes had days entirely taken up by meetings, left me pretty much suicidal TBH.

All our senior staff are to be given iPads, shortly. **** knows how many support workers we could employ with that money. 🙄

The trouble with constructive meetings is you generally have a pile of minutes to write up afterwards, I’d rather just have the waste of time meetings where no one cares what happened for 2 hours…

My favourite is when people decide to offer their opinion on legal issues.

is their opinion that all legal stuff is a great big steaming horse-crapping waste of time?

My last meeting was held whilst sitting on a fridge drinking a half pint glass of tea. We sorted it out in time for Popmaster finishing.

when I work at GMP I used to decline all meeting requests that didn’t have an agenda (which was pretty much all of them). a few poeple used to do things properly but they generally knew what they were doing and moved on when the government made it clear there was no future in the public sector.