Meeting Chaos
Published in
2 min readNov 25, 2018
In this post, I’m going to quickly list all of the things that come to mind about why meetings and scheduling are so terrible in most organizations.
- There are too many
- They are too long for the content they need to cover
- The don’t have objectives or a purpose (stated or unstated)
- Attendees often don’t know why they are there
- Non-attendees don’t know why they aren’t there
- Whiteboard markers don’t work
- Someone wants a “status” update that could be handled in a 5 min. email
- Outlook
- No one takes notes
- People are afraid to talk because their boss or someone else’s boss is there
- Attendees have been in meetings all day already
- Attendees are worried about the real work they have to do
- There is no meeting place designated
- Someone is in the designated meeting place already
- The temperature in the room is uncomfortably off by +- 10 degrees
- The chairs are garbage
- Half of the room is writing an email
- Someone(s) is (are) arrogant
- The meeting is double booked
- Attendees are late
- Attendees leave early
- The meeting was really for two people to fight something out, but they wanted an audience
- Too many people
- Too few people
- Colds (lost voice)
- Bad timing (no gaps for focus)
- Runs over time for no good reason
- Phones ringing
- Video conferencing bad
- Microphone bad
- Can’t find the right dongle (dang it USB-c)
- Dongle doesn’t work (dang it Display Port)
- Input is wrong
- TV remote batteries are dead
- Airplay is slow
- Chromecast (or Airplay) is on wrong wi-fi
- Remote people can’t see whiteboard
- Wi-fi too slow
- No decision possible
- No decision maker in the meeting
- The purpose of the meeting has been invalidated by a previous meeting but the meeting owner doesn’t know it
- There are too many