It was one of THOSE
days. Sure, Fridays are always the best day of the week — but a little less so
when they start with a meeting first thing and end with a meeting that goes
until nearly 5pm. Not to mention the additional meetings in between.
Fortunately they were four very necessary and effective meetings, but meetings
do tend to make days feel a bit longer — and they definitely make it tougher to
get the rest of the day’s work done.
When I worked at
Franklin Covey, it seemed like the days were FILLED with meetings. In fact,
there was an unwritten rule there: Never end a meeting without scheduling the
next meeting. YIKES! Fortunately most of those meetings had very clear agendas,
emailed out in advance, and that same agenda was used as the format for the
meeting to keep things on track and on subject. And Robert’s Rules of Orders
were pretty typically followed. But most importantly they ALWAYS started on
time — even if you were alone in the room. Even 15 years ago, we had very
well-equipped meeting rooms with whiteboards, pens, projectors, etc.
Nowadays most meetings happen “virtually”. Although I often
host meetings through my Adobe Connect (which I do love), I sit in my same desk
chair at my same desk with my phone headset on for almost every meeting. Most
of the time meetings involve us all staring at some Excel spreadsheet that
someone is sharing from their computer desktop. For other meetings, it’s just a
conference call — so some (certainly NEVER me) are multitasking, powering
through emails and last minute reports while purportedly laser-focused on the
conversation at hand.
But by 5pm the only meeting I was interested in was heading
home and meeting my dinner.
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