Death by 1,000 Meetings

Limiting screen time is a current concern for a large percentage of parents. When I was a kid, my screen time was also regulated. Not by my parental units, but by the fact that we only had access to three channels, and except for Saturday morning, the programming was completely geared toward adults. It’s tough to get a seven year old to appreciate the humor of “All in the Family” long enough to sit through 30 minutes with commercials.

In contrast, my four year old has an unlimited supply of fun or educational cartoons available, sans commercials, 24/7.

But my screen time was also limited by the communication I received from society at large, which essentially boiled down to “Don’t watch TV, it will rot your brain.” The message was clear, time spent watching Voltron, Saved by the Bell, and wrastlin’ were all monumental wastes of time, even for children.

While I accepted the rhetoric, I still logged PLENTY of hours on the couch during my teen and early Twenties—mostly nursing hangovers. While I enjoyed the leisure of wasting entire afternoons watching Real World marathons, society’s message often nagged at me, even to the point of diminishing my enjoyment. “You’re wasting your time” was always present in the back of my conscious.

Then I became an adult.

And as an adult, I have watched millions of wasted man hours in the trivial pursuit of Corporate America’s favorite pastime… meetings.

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Any human who has spent any amount of time behind cubicle walls knows the story of wasted hours. Although every meeting has different variables, so many of them have the same unpleasant and unproductive qualities: topic is too vague, no agenda, boring, tedious, doesn’t accomplish anything, and most effective meetings achieve the same results as a well-crafted two paragraph email.

Worker bees have also perfected a plethora of strategies to occupy themselves during meetings from hell. There’s the doodler, the note taker, the phone checker, the talker, and then there’s the silent type that are daydreaming of the beach, the mountains, or maybe even thinking about a past episode of Saved by the Bell. Myself, I’m a pincher. I pinch myself to stay awake, and to avoid screaming “You’re wasting my time!” as I turn over a table, and storm out of a bad meeting.

SAVED BY THE BELL -- Season 2 -- Pictured: (l-r) Mario Lopez as Alabert Clifford 'A.C.' Slater, Dennis Haskins as Mr. Richard Belding, Lark Voorhies as Lisa Turtle, Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski, Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano, Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zachary 'Zach' Morris, Dustin Diamond as Screech Powers -- Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank
SAVED BY THE BELL Pictured: (l-r) Mario Lopez as Alabert Clifford ‘A.C.’ Slater, Dennis Haskins as Mr. Richard Belding, Lark Voorhies as Lisa Turtle, Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski, Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano, Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zachary ‘Zach’ Morris, Dustin Diamond as Screech Powers — Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank

There are a plethora of blog posts and books with fantastic strategies for harnessing the power of meetings. But I have found the most effective way is to simply avoid them—at all costs.

While this may prove trickier to accomplish given your specific employment status, reduction and even elimination of meetings should be the goal. The marketing master, Seth Godin, provides some excellent strategies on meeting improvement and elimination here and here.

As an entrepreneur, I’m involved in different segments of the economy, and it’s interesting to see what role meetings play in various industries. For example, the manufacturing companies I monitor all have essential operational meetings to start and conclude every week. These gatherings are necessarily repetitive, but efficient. In essence, manufacturing processes constantly need tweaked and the line needs monitored, these factors reduce needless meetings.

Typically service industries have less meetings due to the fact that their employees are usually actively serving their customers. Finally, there are the governmental meetings I’m sometimes forced to attend. While I believe the role of a modern day government should be active and effective, in reality, government is only an accumulation of other human beings trapped inside of one non-stop meeting. If you have to attend governmental meetings, my only advice is to bring plenty of reading material. Sorry.

Some meetings are essential in moving the ball forward, but most are not. The ones that are time wasters need to be treated as such, and removed. Not tweaked, streamlined, or revamped, but eliminated.

At the end of the day, you can take control of your own time. For example, I’m skipping a meeting right now, and watching old episodes of Voltron on YouTube.

The Farmers Market Jerk of the Week

I’ve always had a deep affection for local farmers markets. For the past seven years, I’ve spent nearly every Saturday morning perusing mine. As an entrepreneur, I also view the experience as a refresher course on point of purchase marketing and consumer etiquette. Fortunately, I live in one of the sunniest places on the planet (Southern California), making it possible to people and produce watch 51 weeks a year (off Christmas week).

While the long growing seasons provide ample fruits and vegetables, our market also offers plenty of crafts and activities to keep every generation in the family happy. There’s a miniature train ride, popsicles, kettle corn, and balloon animals for the kids. Handmade aprons, jewelry, tamales, and a plethora of artisanal culinary delights for the adults.

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Over the years, I’ve gotten to know every farmer that my family purchases from and many of the customers as well. We’ve developed a level of familiarity that when we skip a week, our absence is often asked about.  To have a mutually beneficial shopping relationship with pleasant people is a breath of fresh air in today’s retail environment where customer service has been forgotten.

But just like produce, a few bad apples can spoil an entire shopping experience. Today, I saw the ultimate farmers market bad apple.

No, I’m not referring to the crowd of foodies taking up half a stall debating which type of radish tastes the most tart, or the young lady who scarfed down an entire plate of samples, only to scurry away when the farmer turned around to help another customer, or the woman pushing a cart that took up 99% of the aisle. We all encounter these types of behaviors on a regular basis. Most only deserve a shrug and a nod to human idiosyncrasies.

I’m writing about the gentleman who didn’t correct the arithmetic mistake made on his purchase of: one bag of green beans, two heads of kale, three avocados, and two bunches of carrots. The twinkle in his eye, his body language, and the single dollar he put back into his pocket told me he definitely knew his total was seventeen, not the sixteen dollars he was charged.

One dollar.

These particular farmers (husband, wife, and daughter) wake up at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday so they can finish harvesting and load their truck. They drive over an hour to our neighborhood, where they will spend the next five hours baking in the sun. They deliver some of the least expensive organic food to their customers before driving home and repackaging their unsold produce. Their fifteen hour day is repeated six days a week, as they attend markets throughout Orange and LA counties.

Not wanting to cause a scene, but wanting to keep my farmers market karma intact, I paid for my veggies, and handed Maria an extra two dollars. “I’ll pick up another head of lettuce on my way out,” I said.

Oops, I forgot the lettuce.

Mary and her family see close to a thousand customers a day. Yes, they’re only performing basic math, but even simple subtraction gets difficult when you’re tired and have several customers simultaneously pulling at you.

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I try to be a good customer; I don’t molest each piece of fruit before putting it back. I’m efficient and courteous while filling my bags. But, I often rely on their arithmetic. I tell them what I bought, and they tell me how much I owe them. It’s simple laziness on my part. Next week, I’ll give them the purchase total right after telling them what I bought. It’s a small change that will probably go unnoticed. But, if it takes just a small burden off of people who do so much for me and my family, then bring on the addition and subtraction.

Human contact has been removed from many of our economic transactions these days. But it’s the personal relationship element, the sense of doing what’s right for your customer and fellow man, that allows lifestyle businesses to remain successful, and for growth companies to scale while remaining true to their core. It’s also what keeps people from being jerks at your local farmers market.