How many meetings does the world need?
Well, judging by the effectiveness of the meetings i've attended, zero. I am actually currently sitting in a meeting. My typing is working to my advantage, I think. It looks like i'm writing down notes. Looking around I see two people actually paying attention, which includes the person speaking. What are we going to get out of this meeting besides anxiety? A whole bunch of papers that i'll leave in my car for a few weeks and then throw away as part of my bi-annually car cleaning. *Speaking of which, the weather is getting nice outside. That means it's about car cleaning season.*
I'm of the persuasion that we, as Americans, are over-meetinged. We live in a technological world full of technology-whatnots, and how do we utilize this ingenuity? By using technology to communicate to each other the times and places which we should meet to communicate to each other....
While in high school I stumbled upon this great little website called quickdot.com. If wonders exist, it was a wonder. You could add these little boxes on your quickdot page wherein you would have little instant message sessions. They weren't so much instant messages, more like little message boards. So on one page you could see all your "quickdot" conversations at once. Simple, convenient, and many more adjectives of the like. You could even add group quickdots. We had a group of about thirty friends where we would all chat about whatever we felt like for the day. The best part was, just like any other message board, you didn't have to be on at the same time. You could log in any time during the day and see what everyone else had said and add your two cents.Now that's a meeting I could get behind. Every time I saw a post from "that guy" who always had something to say but never seemed to have a point, i'd just skip it instead of sitting for ten minutes mentally repeating "we don't care, we're hungry, stop talking!"
*DISCLAIMER* quickdot.com went offline in 2001 despite my attempts to tell the world about it.
