I hate meetings. Some are necessary, most are not. What I’ve noticed is that certain people will just start adding people to meetings and then the meeting has 20+ people in it. There is no way to negatively reenforce that they are doing something bad, especially when 17-18 of those people are just sitting there staring at the wall. The other situation is the 2-3+ hour meeting that doesn’t really accomplish anything. Giving people a short meeting time causes people to work things out quickly and take less important and off task issues outside of the meeting. So my proposal is Meeting Points.

Meeting Points is a work in progress, but here is what I’ve been thinking about:

  • Everyone gets a certain amount of meeting points a month (lets say, 1 a day for the month…30)
  • For each 30 minutes of a meeting you schedule, you have to pay 1 meeting point.

Pretty simple! But the idea of meeting points isn’t to just limit people who schedule too many long meetings, it’s to punish them! Penalties are where the fun kicks in.

  • Meetings over an hour, 1.5x meeting point penalty. (2 hour meeting costs 6 meeting points)
  • Meetings over 6 people costs 1 point per person over
  • Meetings after 5pm cost 2x meeting points.
  • Meetings after 4pm on friday cost 3x meeting points.
  • Meetings during lunch or lunch meetings cost 2x meeting points.

Okay now we’re in business. “Wait! I’m really important and I need to schedule a lot of meetings! How do I get more points?!” Well, you can buy points from other people who don’t schedule lots of important meetings. People like developers and engineers will have a ton, since they don’t schedule a ton of meetings. You may have to make a deal to get those points. Also be careful how many useless meetings you schedule them for, they may not want to sell their points to someone who makes them sit around for hours when they could be getting work done.

update

few people have given me some more ideas. I think that if you schedule a meeting and it only runs for 1⁄2 the allotted time you should get back some of your meeting points. 30 min meeting under 15 minutes, all back. Hour meeting under 30 mins, get 1⁄2 back.