The Top Five Reasons not to Call an Agenda-free Meeting

Meetings can be useful and essential and even inspiring. They can also be a tremendous waste of time and energy. Harvard Business Review has a handy calculator that helps determine the cost of a meeting. This calculator addresses time spent and the cost to a business based on how much the attendees are paid.

It’s a good start, but it doesn’t address the annoyance cost of the agenda-free meeting.

1. Meetings are not inherently useful. That means they need to have a purpose.

2. Share that purpose with others. Otherwise, it looks like power tripping because . . .

3. The person who called the meeting inevitably has an agenda.

4. Secret agendas are annoying at best. They can also be threatening.

5. Meetings are not inherently useful, and worse, they can be really inefficient and frustrating. Not telling people why they are coming to a meeting increases your chances of an inefficient and frustrating meeting.

Multiply the length of the meeting by the number of people attending to get a rough estimate of the time cost.

PS Telling people you want to “gather information” with no additional detail is not an agenda, but it’s something.