Cam Daigle: “I have a system – a survival mechanism, really – for classifying, planning, and executing meetings in a way that helps keep me sane at work. I’ve shared it with enough folks for whom it was also a survival mechanism that it’s now a system, at a URL, for you.

• You can’t solve meeting problems with other meetings. Managers generally feel more effective when they’re communicating directly with people, which means they tend to be fans of meetings, so they try to solve issues with meetings through other meetings.
• You also can’t solve meeting problems by removing them. Individual contributors, however, generally feel more effective when they’re plying their trade. They often feel like meetings pull them away from their ‘real work’, so they try to solve issues with meetings by checking out or not attending.
• Not more, not less – just better. I’ll go ahead and tell you this up front: my system isn’t necessarily a path to having fewer meetings. After all, everyone’s threshold for ‘too many meetings’ is different based on what helps them feel effective at their role, and every company’s need for meetings is dependent upon the work they’re trying to accomplish. I’m hoping this system helps you have better meetings – that the people running the meeting feel like it’s worth their time to run them, and that the people in attendance feel like their presence there matters. There’s even a possibility that once you’ve worked through this system, you end up with more meetings, because you’ve realized you need to break apart one monstrous, all-encompassing meeting that’s trying to do too many things…”