A Blog History in Time
Parkinson’s Law says “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. This theory as suggested by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1955 can be interpreted in two ways. One understanding implies procrastination, these days we call it Student Syndrome, that makes us put off doing work until we’re right up to the deadline, and the other refers to the bureaucratic nature of offices where we all make more work for each other than we need to.
This got me thinking about how we use our time and whether we’re all just stuck in bad habits. Why do all meetings last an hour when they could be shorter? We’ve all sat in a meeting, given our contribution and then remained for another unnecessary 45 minutes while decisions are made that don’t concern us. Obviously we break our schedule into hours because it portions out our day and makes it more manageable but if there are 8 hours in a working day and you have 4 meetings, that’s half of your day gone already!
I’ve heard of companies that schedule meetings at obscure times, known as the Swiss Railway approach, starting at 10.47am and finishing at 11.28am for example, the idea being that you can break the meeting down into even smaller chunks of a few minutes and allocate the exact time you need to discuss each point. Yet, that type of stringent planning makes me worry about stifling creativity and spontaneity.
I think that all it requires is a bit of common sense and forward planning, by implementing a broader range of meeting times, ranging from 5 minutes to 5 hours we could all recoup some of those important hours lost in long agenda-less meetings. Sometimes there’s no need to invite everyone for the full duration of the meeting either but it might be important that they’re there for 10 minutes.
I still believe that a real life meeting is a vital form of communication, especially in this digital age where we can communicate in so many other ways that avoid having to look a person in the eye because everyone knows that some things will just never get done otherwise. Right, I best dash, don’t want to be late for my 7 minute meeting starting at 9.04am!
