Introduction
Hello everybody, I am the funny Donkey and today I am going to tell you how to organize inefficient meetings.
Have you ever been to this kind of meetings that are short, focused, with the right people and good agenda, where everybody is prepared and conclusions are made quickly?
Well, if you follow my advices, you will never have such a meeting in your life anymore! So, stay tuned and watch further.
I have collected some of the worst practices I have seen in meetings during my long career and I will share them with you.
If you follow them strictly, they will help you not only to decrease the quality of your meetings, but eventually to become the ultimate time waster in the office.
This is especially important if you are not happy at your workplace, because inefficient meetings are actively killing your company. With a bit of luck and persistency, you won’t need to worry about your job anymore!
Before you schedule your next meeting, you should consider several things.
Do you really need this meeting?
First thing that you have to ask yourself when you are planning to organize a meeting is
Do you really need this meeting?
And the answer is
It doesn’t really matter 🙂
You need the meeting or not, just gather the people, start talking and you will figure it out.
Whom to invite?
The more people you invite, the better, because then the meeting is not so focused. You may get few ideas (or distractions) and at the end you will waste the time of many, many people. This is super, especially if you want to bankrupt your company.
Setting goals and agenda
The next advice is about setting goals and agenda. No matter what goals you try to achieve with this meeting, please never ever share them with the other participants.
The more unclear the goals are, the better, because if people don’t know what you are going to talk about in this meeting, they cannot prepare.
You will look like the smartest person in the room, because you are the only one who knows what this meeting is about!
Even for not so smart people, this trick will definitely help to stand out.
How about timing and duration?
Do you need a 15 minutes call to clarify something with 3 people? Then simply invite 10 people and make the meeting 1 hour. This way you will have enough time in case you exceed the required 15 minutes.
Considering that you didn’t prepare any agenda, then you will definitely exceed the time, because the discussion is not focused.
But don’t worry about the timing. In case the 1 hour is also not enough, just continue the discussion for another 30 minutes.
The other 10 people that you invited may need to join another meeting in the meantime, so you should make sure they are stuck in yours and they cannot go out. If you are afraid that some people may start leaving, then simply lock the door of the meeting room.
If the meeting is online, then it is harder to keep the people longer. You can increase your chances by explicitly announcing that if anybody dares to leave, you will report the case to their manager.
Even if they are not relevant at all, it doesn’t really matter. Show them who is in charge in this meeting, demonstrate some power and force them to stay.
Do you need meeting minutes?
Don’t even think about taking notes. Nobody read them later anyway.
At the end of the meeting, no matter what decisions are taken, please never, ever document them.
Probably everybody will remember them next month when you meet again about the same topic. If accidently they don’t, this is a great opportunity for you to look smarter, by pushing the facts in their face and telling them what they forgot to do.
Don’t ever dare sending meeting minutes in order to ensure that people wasted their time efficiently. Especially if you hate your company, that is very good way to maximize the loses. The more people you invite, the higher are the costs of the meeting and you can have endless discussions.
Higher company costs, may reduce the bonuses for employees, but probably if you are organizing such meetings, you are not the one who will get a bonus anyway. Am I right?
Summary
Follow my advices and I can ensure you that you will never have an efficient meeting in your life. I hope you remembered everything that I said. Even if you didn’t, that’s fine, because this is the way I organize meetings. Half of the people don’t remember what was discussed and the other half probably got it wrong, because we were talking two hours and we all lost our time.
Thank you for staying with me until the end. That’s all from me for today. Stay tuned for my next session. I will share with you more good tips that will help you to be inefficient and waste your time.
