Why not unmeetings?
I agree with Jackie. Meetings with agendas and objectives suck.
I’m very thankful that my current work situation doesn’t involve endless meetings. It does involve a lot of creative collaboration and ad hoc discussions, but nothing of the “sit in the conference room with 15 other people and watch PowerPoint” variety.
When I worked for the government I sometimes spent hours a day in long, boring, and mostly pointless meetings where two people would take up 90% of the conversation while everyone else sat around trying to stave off sleep. Some days I would be in meetings for four hours out of the day.
I used to think of a girl I had a class with in college. On the first day of class she told the professor that she was narcoleptic, so hey if I fall asleep, it’s just my condition. She never fell asleep in class and I don’t know if she was really narcoleptic but it seemed like a brilliant ploy at the time. And I would sit there at the one-hour mark of some status meeting thinking oh God why didn’t I use that narcolepsy bit when I started working here.
So why not unmeetings? Just send off an email and say “hey, a few of us are going to talk about the marketing strategy for the client at 10am. Stop by if you have something you’d like to share.”