Ditching the human interface

Meetings: a great way to feel important, but a huge dent in your productivity and often the cause of long hours and frustration.

Some people believe in avoiding all meetings. However, for those of us who rely on clients to pay our salaries, this is not a smart idea. Some meetings are necessary, but most are a waste of time. For all the chest-beating, name-dropping and use of buzz words such as "let's touch base", "discuss offline", or "circle back", I can only recall a handful of meetings where progress was actually made.

So, here are my general rules to minimise being couped up in a small room with smelly co-workers:

1. Don't attend internal (i.e. non-client) meetings. Pretend to be working on something urgent instead, and you will continue to have an "internal profile" of being important. Internal meetings are just a forum for people to whinge and complain, or where you tell people how important you are. If absent for the right reason, your importance will propogate itself.


2. Stick to business - if you have scheduled a meeting to discuss work, then do just that. Other than two sentences or so, don't waste time on niceties or asking about the wife, kids, or Aunt Zelda. If you want to socialise, meet your client for a drink (and pick up the tab, don't be cheap). But use meetings to get through things! Clients who know you will appreciate your work ethic and will actually have more to say at social gatherings or networking sessions (a topic for another blog post!)


3. Agendas - stick to them. And circulate in advance. Any meeting where you do not know what will be discussed and what you need to contribute is going to be a black hole in your diary. Agenda items that are not tightly defined will see people deviate or get distracted. So skip meetings with ambiguous agendas.


4. Avoid cafes - meet in an office so you can follow rule #2. If you meet in a cafe, the tendency will be to keep it casual and talk nonsense.


5. Pretend you are double-booked. And remind the other person constantly. That way, they will feel you are super short of time and will stick to the key themes. Unimportance issues can be dealt with later.