The Definitive Guide to More Productive Meetings
They don’t have to feel like a time suck
To plenty of people, it’s a workplace morning ritual as common as filling your coffee mug: You sit down at your desk, open your calendar, and feel your heart sink as you realize just how many meetings you have.
At least misery loves company. It’s rare to find someone who actually enjoys a workday clogged with meetings — partly because we’re conditioned to hate them, according to organizational psychologist Joseph Allen, and partly because so many of them are just plain bad.
“Meetings are often run poorly, and we cannot recoup the time lost in a bad meeting,” says Allen, the director of the Center for Meeting Effectiveness at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. “It’s normative in our culture to despise meetings and to empathize with people when they have meetings… Watercooler talk is often dominated by people complaining about a meeting, things that happened in the meeting, the time wasted in meetings, and so forth.”
“We love meetings for what they can do, but hate that they often don’t do well what we want them to do.”
Recently, inspired by his own frustration with the meetings that dominated his workday, Allen and a team of…
