Bored Meetings

A classmate of mine was presenting on the different types of agendas the other day and she mentioned one called the Thoughtful Agenda which is “designed with the end in mind.”

Oh my God. That’s a thing? That shouldn’t be a thing. All agendas should be thoughtful and designed with the purpose of reaching conclusions of some sort.

As I mentioned before, I hate meetings. And I’m passionate about abolishing all boring, waste-of-time gatherings and replacing them with organized, productive ones. Here are some things you need in order for that to happen:

You need to plan ahead
You have to think about what you want to accomplish in a meeting and what you need to have in place ahead of time. This means every meeting should have an agenda that has been shared well before the meeting. If you have supporting docs, those should go out too.

You have to engage the attendees
Sometimes you have to have a meeting that no one wants to have about some brutally dull topic. It happens. But that doesn’t mean you have to be boring too. Do what it takes to get people engaged. This means (more) prep ahead of time. Do you need to find a gym so you can have the meeting while walking on treadmills? Do you need to go buy Playdough so everyone has something to fidget with while they are thinking? Maybe you need to go buy some beer to take the edge off. Whatever it is that will help get the group excited and ready to participate, figure it out and have it planned out ahead of time.

You have to time it out
Your agenda needs to have each discussion piece listed and those pieces need to be timed out. If you have an hour to come to a decision and you spend 30 minutes on some trivial detail from the first agenda item, you’re already screwed.

You have to have a facilitator
You need someone to move the meeting along. This person will keep track of time and make sure to move the group on when time is up or – if the discussion is useful and time needs to be rearranged – will do that on the fly and figure out how to still leave the meeting with decisions made or a list of action items.

You have to walk away with something
When a meeting is over, you have to know who will be doing what by when. And beware the royal we. “Oh yeah, we need to get that report to Cindy in accounting.” Who is we? Which one person is going to be responsible for making sure that Cindy gets that report? Without this, balls get dropped.

You need to have a reason to meet
Are you having a weekly staff meeting just because it’s Monday? Don’t. You can schedule regular meetings, but if you really don’t have anything to do, cancel it. And never go over stuff that could easily be shared ahead of time or read outside of the meeting. If you read something aloud that I have in front of me, know that I want to punch you in the throat. I created an SNL skit in my head once (during a meeting, natch) about a character that is always attending boring meetings and in each skit he finds a new unique way to kill himself. Hilarious, right? That’s totally what I’m doing when you’re going over something that I could read myself. I’m tuning out. Everyone is. If you’re speaking at a meeting and no one is looking you in the eye or they have that kind of glazed over look – you are being tuned out.

No one likes to be bored. Take the extra time to make sure your meetings are engaging and productive. It just takes a little forethought and planning.