No More Meetings!
They achieve nothing. I’m over it
I moved to China for work 2 years ago.
I’ve had more meetings in that time than Gordon Ramsey has told someone to f*ck off.
I can’t believe the enormous amount of time that my company wastes with meetings. My company isn’t even the worst, my partner’s company seems dedicated to wasting everyones time with endless meetings.
It’s not even just the time spent attending the meetings thats wasted, it’s all the time spent preparing for the meeting the day before.
Colleagues in my company will spend an entire day creating PowerPoint presentations to show off during the meeting.
They spend hours arranging fonts for a slide that I’m not even looking at because I’m Facebook Messaging under the table.
This whole exercise is an enormous waste of time.
The presenting person isn’t telling me anything I couldn’t have learned from a WeChat message (this is China after all).
There’s got to be a better way!
What really kills me is that most of the people in the room never needed this information.
We all had to derail our day to come to this snooze-fest, and for what? All I’ve ever left a meeting with is a page full of messy notes and a hunger for pizza.
Why didn’t someone just send me the notes? And the pizza?
“I’d rather do 700, even 1,000 or more emails, than sit in long and tedious and boring meetings… The only way you’re going to get me for a meeting is if you’re writing me a check.”- Mark Cuban
Enough is enough
I’m on holiday right now, so the last thing I’m thinking about is meetings. (Except for right now).
But when I get back I’m going to be making some serious changes with the way I run my team.
I was never the one to call meetings, but I should have been the one to stop them. This is how things are going to run from now on.
If we have to see each other, it’s on my terms.
There are three times in a 19 week semester that I absolutely have to see my team, so if I really need to see them, we’re going to do it somewhere I’d already be anyway.
The Shed (a wings and ribs joint in Shanghai).
I enjoy being at The Shed anyway. Great food, great drinks, great atmosphere. Why not chat to the team over a plate of ribs and a cocktail?
Eat some food, discuss whatever, get things done.
Group text.
WeChat is a great messaging app, I can manage groups of people with relative ease.
We’ll all get together in the group, share some ideas and message individually when things get personal.
We can make little sub-section groups when needed, and be much more productive wherever we are.
I’m not coming to the office if I don’t need to print anything, so I can just work from home.
Going forward
So from now on I’ll just leave the WeChat app open, and you can get me whenever you need me.
I’m declaring a war on meetings.
We live in the future, and meetings are a useless replica of the past. Let’s leave them behind! Who’s with me?!
