Problems with Meetings and Calendars

It’s amazing to me how many opportunities exist for improvement in areas that are seemingly solved already.

Calendaring and meetings seem to fit this pattern nicely. So much of the toil of calendaring has been optimized by digital calendars. They are always up to date, they can’t be eaten by your dog, they are able to connect structured data so you can invite the right “Dave” to your meeting. It’s quite the improvement over the Franklin Planner.

Yet, I see oceans of opportunity. Meetings are still terrible. Why? How can we get better at them? How can we help each other improve? How many meetings are too many for a person in a day? Does this vary by personality or role? What is the right cadence for recurring meetings? What if every meeting started with a clear objective? what are the rules and standards for meetings? Should I pay for coffee? Does everyone have to attend? Do we use the “optional” setting in Google Calendar intentionally? How do you run a good design session? Or what about a decision making session? Is it rude to cancel the meeting if no one is prepared?

The best solutions we have to the above problems today are blog posts and rants like this one.

Someone should really build some software around these problems…