The Art of Meeting

I live in a world of meetings. Most meetings are unproductive and at times counter-productive.
How do you prevent wasting valuable time? Download one of the meeting calculator. Type in the number of people, take a guess how much the group of people make per hour, and how long the meeting the meeting is going to last. How much will it cost per hour or per minute to have this meeting? Yikes. Throw in pricy consultants and a project manager and this meeting could bankrupt small company.

So how do you fix this?
1)Plan the meeting before you schedule the meeting.
Create an agenda; plan what needs to be discussed.
2)Only invite the people you need to the meeting.
Counter-productive people need not attend.
3)Meet with stakeholders seperately.
Give stakeholders a seperate meeting. Give them their updates and statuses. By meeting with them seperately your team meeting can focus and avoid politics. Plus your team can be more open with ideas and even unpopular status information.
4)Assign someone to take notes.
Sometimes a meeting happens and everyone forgets what was said. Someone other than the meeting facilitator needs to take notes so the meeting can stay on track with the agenda.
5)Have a timekeeper.
So many meetings go on and on about a point and time gets away. When you create the agenda try to determine how long each topic should take.
6)Send out the agenda ahead of time.
This allows others to ask questions ahead of time that may help provide information ahead of time. This may even shorten or even eliminate the meeting.

Good luck out there. Think before you schedule that next meeting; the time and sanity you save may be your own.