I always liked the One Minute Manager's take on this.
The idea is that everyone should be able to state their current goals and progress within a minute. And that's how long your meeting with your manager should be. If you can't do that, it's too complicated.
Other meetings, like brain storms with mutually trusting participants, can of course be longer.
In my experience, shops with too many meetings don't get much done and generally drive high-performing people away; shops with fewer meetings are busy.. working, selling and helping customers.. having smaller, shorter, informal meetings to unblock work.
Lots of standing meetings are one big sign of wasted time. A typical guideline to cut these down is to only allow standing meetings for:
- team meetings or project sprints about what was done, what is needed, what is coming up or customer issues
- 1:1's
- all-hands / retreats (rare)
Otherwise, no meetings without an agenda... which reduces calendar load and makes people plan their thoughts to make the best of everyone's time.
And as Mark Cuban does, fire all the useless pyramid builders (VPs, managers and coordinators) until only useful people remain.
At the risk of easy snark, I can't help but wonder how quickly the author's disdain for the privilege of "Maker hours" would disappear after a week of hour-on/hour-off meetings. Doubly so if this article's deadline were looming.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] threadThe idea is that everyone should be able to state their current goals and progress within a minute. And that's how long your meeting with your manager should be. If you can't do that, it's too complicated.
Other meetings, like brain storms with mutually trusting participants, can of course be longer.
Lots of standing meetings are one big sign of wasted time. A typical guideline to cut these down is to only allow standing meetings for:
- team meetings or project sprints about what was done, what is needed, what is coming up or customer issues
- 1:1's
- all-hands / retreats (rare)
Otherwise, no meetings without an agenda... which reduces calendar load and makes people plan their thoughts to make the best of everyone's time.
And as Mark Cuban does, fire all the useless pyramid builders (VPs, managers and coordinators) until only useful people remain.
Problem (mostly) solved, until the next meeting.
May be we could pray instead or have a yoga session :-)