Cancel all Meetings..... No Seriously....

Meetings, meetings, everywhere and not a drop of decision. If you work in a large organization, I am sure you feel put upon by the amount of meetings you have to attend. Not the kinds that really accomplish anything except to stroke some egos, but the kinds that simply steal your valuable time for no tangible outcome. The amazing thing is that for many institutions these same wasteful meetings probably at one time accomplished something practical, but if you are in an older established company, you are probably attending some "habit meetings"---you know the ones that have just been around forever. A manager recently asked me how I would decide which meetings were valuable and which were no longer necessary. The answer was easy. I told him, "Cancel all meetings...." He looked at me like I had three heads. "No, seriously....."

When I took over as director/administrator of my addictions unit, I had been there for several years and attended all the mandatory, wasteful meetings. I knew they weren't all a waste and that some overlapped in purpose, but I did not want to lose any that actually were helpful. I still was not sure which I should keep, so I cancelled them all for three weeks except for the JCAH required staffing of patients. When I announced it the staff looked at me in the same way as this recent client. My thinking was that if I let the dust settle and allowed people to make their own schedule with the newly opened time slots, any gathering of people that repeated itself to exchange information was probably genuinely productive and therefore would be kept as long as it was useful. After a couple of weeks what could be done on the phone or e-mail was done and if real conversation exchange were necessary, the relevant people would gather and leave when the info exchange was finished. I was right. It happened just like that. People gathered when necessary and a few of these gatherings became regularly attended using only what time was needed.

Realize though, this radical step of cancelling all meetings takes courage because everyone is married to at least one meeting. My point is that the information exchange may not need to include an actual gathering in one room and can be done on an "as needed" basis. The other needed gatherings will form around the necessary people's schedule and can actuallly float during the week to fit flexibly to any acute scheduling problems of the attendees. If a meeting forms casually it is needed, if not, the information was probably exchanged in some other manner.

So to see which of your meetings are really necessary, cancel them all for a while. Seriously.