An inescapable fact of life in web development and product design is meetings. Frankly when I was first freelancing I thought the notion of the hours long info share was sort of a myth; as I began to work in teams later I realized they were not mythical, but rather nightmarish. Often, meetings would drag on for hours or even consume entire workdays. It seemed that no one was able to hold focus for much longer than an hour, but the meetings would continue anyway. In fact, these marathons stretched the meaning of the term meetings and veered dangerously toward seminars. Most of them had no real agendas, and almost everyone in the meeting was seeing new information for the first time.

I found myself yesterday in a planning session with a large group of people. We were asked to, among other things, talk a little bit about the stuff we’re asked to do too often in our office lives. Unsurprisingly almost every group mentioned meetings. So the object of this post is to share some ideas for making meetings—something I stress really are important in development—something more useful than they may be for you right now.

I. Meeting types
Meetings are not one-size-fits-all. In so many offices, meetings are held because it “seems like the right thing to do”; you want to build consensus for a project, or take the pulse of several team members about their status while on a project and a meeting with everyone involved seems like the best way. Instead, consider a ten minute standup meeting—all parties standing and looking directly at the features, code or colors in question. Another type of meeting that happens constantly is a document review, where a team might get together to go over a timeline or other shared document. The kiss of death in these meetings is twofold: letting them run over about half an hour, and not giving all attendees an opportunity to see the document beforehand. I can’t think of anything more frustrating than watching someone edit a spreadsheet on an overhead projector that I have either never seen before, or that I only occupy a couple of rows in.

In short, keep meeting relevant and short. When only three people need to talk, three people should talk. Avoid concepts and words, and seek concrete actions that you can dole out to everyone at the table. It may seem childish, obvious, or elementary at first to hear yourself saying, “Bob, crank this widget”—but when everyone leaves the room feeling like they have something real to do, they feel much better.

II. Handouts
In our office we’ve gotten as far as doing meeting agendas, and they really help. Agendas at least make participants feel like there’s a map out of the madness, and if all else fails it’s something you can point to to get back on track. One thing we don’t do is a pre-meeting info share of some kind. The pre-meet can be a short email sent to everyone invited that says:

“Hi all-

We’ll be meeting about Project X Wednesday @ 11am. The agenda is attached to this email. At this meeting the project planner, Bob, will expect the following from the team:

• Sue: Wireframes uploaded to Basecamp
• Erik: An answer from Google about the foo API
• Matt: Status update on the data import scripts from WordPress to Joomla

This gives you guys two more full days to bash these things out. You can expect another task from the list at the end of the meeting.

See you then!

-Bob”

The pre-meet puts everyone on the same page. It takes the meeting from the land of the abstract concept to the land of the concrete task check-in. We have to assume that no one is going to do meeting specific preparation, so substitute the actual work for the meeting related busy work and then talk about that.

It might also be a good idea to send along your meeting agenda, as suggested in the example. If it isn’t ready yet, try to send it along no more or less than one day before the meeting. More than two days no one remembers, and twenty∏ minutes before you might as well not bother.

III. Meeting math
If all else fails, and you literally cannot get a hold on meetings consider this formula.

E(Employees) x Pr(Pay rate) x Ml(Meeting length)

If the cost of the meeting in contrast to the profit or cost of your project makes you want to jump out of a window , someone may end up managing meetings for you.