Meetings are the bane of the business world. They are necessary sometimes, but also take up huge amounts of time and rarely seem to actually contribute any progress to whatever project is supposedly under discussion. This is doubly true if a committee is involved. (How to you find the collective intelligence of a committee? Take the IQ of the smartest person on the committee and divide by the number of people.)
There always seem to be people who are present only to obstruct any progress, and others who seem to have no idea what the meeting is actually about. Sometimes the very point of the meeting seems to be to delay and obfuscate. (I did some work once for a moderately large company–several hundred employees–which was having trouble with one of their servers. It kept crashing, taking a whole department down. The server was old and needed to be replaces, so the IT department sprang into action and, you guessed it, held a bunch of meetings. Then they began planning the server migration.
Then they held some more meetings. Then they planned some more. Then they had more meetings. Etc. This went on for months. My own approach tends more towards, “This is what we need to do, let’s get the stuff together and do it,” and this drove me nuts. (When they finally, with great trepidation, attempted to make the actual migration, it went smoothly and was done in just a few hours.)
Meetings are necessary when information must be disseminated to a number of people, and (less so), when input is being sought from a number of people. (I’ve found that if, for example, you need the input of four different department heads on a proposed project, you’ll get better results meeting with the stakeholders individually rather than in one free-for-all meeting.) Look at meetings as a sometimes necessary evil and you have a good chance of keeping them from taking over your decision-making process and workflow.
Google has a nice idea; among their other methods of keeping meetings to the point and on track, they project a clock on the wall, counting down the time remaining in the meeting. My own, somewhat whimsical and much more low-tech, idea is to ban chairs from any meeting. However you do it, the idea is to have a clear idea of what needs to be discussed, hit those points, keep the meeting moving, and make your escape as quickly as possible.
For most of us, after all, the meeting isn’t our work; it’s keeping us from our work. Which, for some people, is the attraction, but unfortunately the work doesn’t go away just because you’re in a meeting. If anything, it multiplies. So get out of those meetings quickly, knock out that work before it can multiply and leave work on time for once.