Full confession – I despise meetings.  I have spent much of my career sitting through insanely inefficient meetings – I prefer to call them “boil the ocean” meetings.  The topics in these meetings usually lacked clarity and focus so the meeting would drift…badly.  Of course, when your boss is sitting in the meeting (or worse, was the one who called it) it is difficult to exit early.

But alas, I have found an inspiring article with a fantastic idea.  This is from Inc.com (emphasis mine):

“Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. You just turn around in your chair and bounce an idea off one of the other 10 people in your office. Keep the floor plan open so people can talk to each other. As the company gets bigger, keep dividing it into smaller and smaller groups. Follow Jeff Bezos’s two-pizza rule: Project teams should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. At Hunch, we don’t have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.”

Caterina Fake is the co-founder of the photo-sharing site Flickr. Her new start-up is Hunch, a website in New York City that takes user input to make recommendations on thousands of subjects.

“When I used to have meetings…” – fantastic.  If I were there, I would drink a pot of coffee myself before heading into that meeting.

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