8 Important tips to help you waste time in meetings

by Mike Rogers

Since most of us need to waste time, I thought it would be beneficial to my blogging audience to provide eight tips you must, must, must incorporate into your meetings. They are legend in most meetings and will help you waste as much time as possible, I guarantee it! 

1. Invite everyone. We all need to waste time, and you wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings by not including them. However, be careful about inviting people who might try to accomplish something during the meeting. On the other hand, make sure you invite people who tell good jokes, like to goof around and are generally entertaining.

2. Don't start the meeting until everyone has arrived. Starting a meeting on time would be rude to those who are late. Plus starting a meeting late helps everyone feel more comfortable about being late next time, which almost assures you will start the meeting late every time.

3. Never, never, never have an agenda. Agendas create structure that can stifle tangents.

4. Leaders should do most if not all of the talking. Since the leader knows best, it makes the most sense that he or she talk the most.

5. Only those with "good" ideas should provide them. Anybody who submits a "stupid" idea should be laughed at, mocked and generally spit upon.

6. Give people freedom to "multitask" during meetings. Let everyone know at the start of the meeting that if they need to do other things such as texting, reading email or answering calls to go right ahead. It will make the meeting all the more productive for everyone.

7. Never make assignments. Assignments mean work will need to be done.

8. Never end a meeting on time. Doing so means you didn't apply items one through seven above!

[Thanks, Mike, for permission to republish your recent article. To learn more about Mike, visit his Teamwork and Leadership Bloggings with Mike Rogers blog.]

My favorite T-shirt says: English Teacher: You Do The Math.

Therefore, you might expect that I would not have studied economics in college or graduate school. Instead, I'm learning economics every week by reading The Economist, a British publication (American edition).

There are four main reasons why I love reading this magazine:

1. It contains clear and lucid technical writing, explaining economics (and politics and history and science) in terms that a general audience can grasp.
   
2. Every article is structured clearly. For example, the first paragraph of an article about automobiles stated the premise: "So a permanent shift toward smaller cars would devastate industry profits." Subsequent paragraphs start with: "One big reason to expect such a shift . . . "; "A second threat to the mix . . . "; "A third threat to the mix . . . "; and so on.
   
3. Authors and editors have a sense of humor. A 2009 article about experimentation on animals is titled "Catheter and Mouse."
4. The publication is almost completely celebrity free (no speculation on sports figures or movie stars).

In addition to learning about economics, I also study American politics in The Economist, probably because its journalists are less partisan than American journalists.  I don't read every article in every issue, of course, but I do learn from each article that I read. There are audio  and online editions as well, and a free one-month trial subscription.