From the Lifehacker blog (plog, Amaz-og; whatever those Amazon kids are calling it these days) at Amazon.

 

Stand up to speed up meetings

2:08 PM PST, March 2, 2007

Weblog OrganizingLA suggests that the key to shorter meetings might be losing the chairs.

Instead of sitting at a traditional conference table, we took the chairs out of the room and ran meetings while standing on our feet. Well, the length of the meetings DRASTICALLY dropped, because people didn’t want to stand for long. Meetings went from 30-60 minutes to roughly 1/2 of that while still delivering meaty content.

So maybe you don’t want to stand up at every meeting you go to, but if your 15- and 30-minute meetings are more often turning into 1- and 2-hour affairs, instituting a few stand-up meetings here and there might be a smart solution.

In fairness, the Stand-up meeting suggestion was qualified. But, I doubt I’m alone among corporate refugees out there who participated in meetings where the topic of the meeting was to shorten the meetings. Why? So, folks can get their work done.

Dibert-ian irony aside, I always thought the purpose of a meeting was to get something done that could not be done by keeping everyone locked to their corner office . . . er . . . office . . . er . . . cubicle . . . er . . . bullpen desk . . . er . . . chair.

It seems to me that meetings should be evaluated on what they accomplish, not what frustrates you about them.

The next time you formulate a clever response to a problem, make sure you are addressing the right problem.