Jason Fried had a nice post the other day about the true cost of meetings. Many people think that a one hour meeting is just that, a one hour meeting, but they are completely ignoring the fact that a one hour meeting is actually one hour times however many people you invited to come to the meeting. When you take the true cost into account, it’s easier to decide if having the meeting is truly necessary. A very plausible example would be a one hour meeting for 5 developers who make $50-100 an hour; that ends up costing the company $250-500. It would only take a few of these five-hour meetings per week to start hurting the bottom line.
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This has a lot to do with the presentation by 37signals’ Jason Fried that I posted about a couple days ago. Its not just the one hour (times each person) that you lose, but rather the one hour times each person plus the added time it takes each of those people to get back “in their groove” of working. It isn’t a light switch that can be switched on and off.
There is an interesting interview thread with Jason and Matt from 37signals and Khoi Vinh (Design Director at the NY Times) and Jeffrey Veen (Product Director for Measure Map among other things) that discusses meetings and how the need for meetings may be something that increases with team size.
Making meetings optional is also a sort of Darwinian way to make sure meeting leaders make sure that their meetings are relevant and important. I like it.