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.

How minimalism is a consumerist menace

There is a problem with minimalism. It is most dramatically and publicly illustrated by Marie Kondo—top tidier—selling things on her web site. How does something as self-aware as minimalism; something as interested in eliminating excess, stuff, clutter, from our lives; something as interested in respect for things (central to Marie Kondo) become a tool for excess consumption? 

Packing for a trip always makes me feel the need to buy something. How does trying to choose just what I need for a weekend have the power to make me think that I don’t have enough stuff? And why does it seem that the further the trip, the more I need to bring? That might some sense for some trips—when you need to bring crucial or important items that are not available or are extremely expensive or hard to find at your destination. But I’m not logical about it.

A weekend in a city with virtually all of the stores and products I usually have available nevertheless fills me with the realization that  nothing I own is worth packing, or that I don’t have quite the right black sweater, despite having three. I fight an atypical urge to shop for clothes. 

It is impossible to choose exactly the right things for an unknown future, whether a weekend trip or the rest of my life. Which is fine, as long as the minimization doesn’t lead to unnecessary consumption, either in the form of panicked last-minute black sweater purchases or replacing perfectly useful and reasonably pleasing items because they don’t feel completely perfect all of the time.

Processes and Policies Aren't Totally Bad

Normally, when I think about processes, I’m thinking about writing processes. I’m seeking to bring greater awareness of a non-linear exploratory set of writing practices to my students, or I’m thinking about process compared to product. 

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about processes in terms of policy. Sometimes the limitations of policies seem aggravating at best and designed to prevent meaningful work. We have to present this for a discussion no one wants to have in order to eventually have a vote few have enough information to meaningfully make. The policy establishes a limiting process that seems designed to steer a system but no one is actually in control. Or no one admits to being in control.

Taking ownership of decisions becomes unnecessary as policies are deemed to be responsible for situations. And the outcome is likely to be stagnation. I’ve spent too long reading about bureaucracies and feeling incredibly frustrated by them.

I see a lot of problems with policies and processes set out by them. I’ve been critical of this aspect of how various groups and  institutions work for a long time. 

But recently, I’ve come to appreciate policies that set forth processes. Sometimes, it’s good to have widely understood ways of doing something, to have agreed-upon or at least explained priorities and ways of approaching decisions. I guess sometimes it is good to see the upside to things that are perpetually annoying.

When Personal Growth Looks Like not Doing Something

I didn’t do something today. It felt personally significant to not do this thing, far more significant than it would have felt to do it. 

Stripping away the tedious details, the process of not doing went something like this:

1. Notice Deadline

I noticed a deadline on my calendar this morning: Today is the last day to submit a project for an upcoming conference. 

2. Reflect

I do not want to go to this conference but thought I should do it anyway. Perhaps something interesting or useful would come of it. 

3. Do (part of) the Thing

I put together a proposal. 

4. Do (more of) the Thing

I filled out an entire online form. 

5. Do Nothing

I did not hit the “submit” button. 

I had some trepidation about this decision. But the fact is that I was only considering this opportunity because I thought that others expected it, or something very like it, from me. 

It has taken me years to be able to not accept this opportunity, to turn my back on this potential achievement that has no appeal to me. I came this close--I even looked up my office phone number, which i can never remember, to enter on the proposal form. 

I escaped, and I didn’t even notice how narrow and significant the escape was until hours later, when my internal calendar alert--more persistent than any electronic device--pinged again, reminding me of the midnight deadline, now mere hours away. 

Saying “no” to something in a culture of achievement is harder than saying “yes” and just doing the work. For me today, that is the point.

Books and Beverages: My Favorite Absurd and Impossible Book Review Concept (1/???)

This is one of my current top three favorite blog ideas: Books and Beverages

This (nonexistent) blog features beverage-centric book reviews. Each review characterizes each book as a drink and gives a pairing recommendation. 

Example 1:

Pride and Prejudice = Prosecco

Jane Austin did the work for me on this one, writing of Pride and Prejudice: “The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling.” 

Elizabeth Bennet’s wit reflects Austin’s and shapes the book: “There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well“ (chapter 24). And yet this is a marriage plot novel, and Elizabeth manages to find and marry someone she both loves and thinks well of, unlikely as that may be. 

Read it with a cup of Earl Grey in a fine China teacup, preferably with a floral pattern including pink and yellow. 

Example 2:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl = green smoothie with kale, wheat grass, and turmeric 

This autobiography written by Linda Brent with editor Lydia Marie Child is good for you, edifying, and will as would be expected leave a bitter taste in your mouth:  “Surely, if you credited one half the truths that are told you concerning the helpless millions suffering in this cruel bondage, you at the north would not help to tighten the yoke” (chapter 5).

Read it with a glass of dry tannic red wine, with an edge, not too sweet, to drown your sorrows.

I Don’t Have a Personal Brand

I think the reason that I have too many blog ideas is that my personal brand is far from developed. 

Here is my current top five list of reasons that my personal brand is not a thing:

1. The very idea of developing a personal brand seems odd (I realize I’m dating myself here).

2. I have a traditional career of a sort that doesn’t necessarily involve or integrate with the personal brand concept. The aforesaid career takes all of my creative energy. 

3. I have young kids. The aforesaid kids take all of my creative energy. 

4. I fear more commitments, more restrictions on who I am and who I can be. Being a woman is confining enough. Being a mother is confining enough. Being an employee is confining enough. Being a household manager is confining enough. Being an adult, a wife, a teacher, a committee member on the infinite committees of the bureaucracy that is life is confining enough. Being a responsible person is The Worst. I don’t think being a self serving jerk would do the trick either, but if I decide to embrace that route, I’ll Tweet the journey.

5. I’m not a photographer. I’m pretty sure cultivating a personal brand requires professional photography. 

*My poor thumb typing (I’m composing on my phone) plus autocorrect has resulted in “confusing” and “condoning” rather than confining several times. The best result: “being a mother is confusing enough.” True. 

1/100 I’m not a blogger and this is my blog (part I)

I have surprised people many times by admitting that I do not have a blog. Over the years, as blogging has emerged, thrived, and developed, I have been asked: “Why don’t you have a blog!?” This is not a serious question, as I have learned by attempting to answer it. I do, as it happens, have a few lists of reasons why not to blog. 

The top of one of the lists is that I don’t have a personal brand. I have some lists about that too, but that’s for another day. What I do have is some self-knowledge. I know that I consistently come back to three things: I like to explore, I like to make, and I like to reflect.

1. Explore

I like to explore— to read widely, go to new places and bring new perspectives to favorite places, immerse myself in rabbit holes of research, and go on adventures medium and small. What of the larger adventures—wandering with no cellphone along a street thousands of miles from anyone I know thinking “I could get lost and disappear forever and no one would figure out what happened”? At this point in my life, with my best efforts, I can’t disappear for five minutes. My work email and my kids are always onto me. But I can develop my curiosity.

2. Make

I like to make—to bake, cook, doodle, arrange, build, art, and craft—sometimes in a straightforward way and others in a way particular to me and my life. I bake bread, for example, and cookies, and I build unrecognizable conceptual playgrounds out of my kids' toys. I doodle for three minutes while my students write.

3. Reflect

I like to reflect—through conversation, writing, and reading, as I look at a tree, a sunset, a painting. And as I consider the number of dishes produced by a simple meal and ask myself if it was worth it, given that no one wanted to actually eat the product of my efforts. In fact, on the back of my mind much of the time, I am asking whether it, whatever “it” is, is worth it. Somehow, even though the answer is often a resounding “probably not,” I am trapped into “it.” What does always feel worthwhile to me is to reflect, even when the result is disheartening. 

I realize this is all very not-suitable-for-branding, but as my grandmother often declared, giving the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes in Hamlet the weight of the scripture that many mistake it for, “To thine own self be true / And it must follow as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Act 1, scene 3).

So I’m not going to try to be brand-ready. Instead, I’m going to try out a range of ideas as I’m taking up the challenge of posting to this blog daily for 100 days. (Sort of. More on that later). This challenge came to me from my brother, Lucas McLaughlin, at http://lucasmclaughlin.com where he is in the midst of Artworking, a 100 day challenge of his own.

I asked for advice, as he’s several days ahead of me in the challenge, and with a far more developed personal brand. “Find your niche,” he said. 

I believe this advice to be excellent. The problem I’ve consistently run into is that I can’t find a niche.

Maybe I secretly don’t want one.

And maybe this blog can do some of the work of developing my space, a niche for myself that feels right.