Another Useless Meeting

I don't remember exactly, but I think it was a presentation on how Apple works internally. A few key points I thought cool:

• Every meeting must draw some decisions(action plan)
• Don't even bother to do a meeting if no decision will be made
• Don't include any employee who has no authority to make decisions

Personally, I don't enjoy wasting my time in useless meetings: I'd rather go back to my desk and do some coding, so I liked the idea.

Later, I actually found myself in a meeting, which followed the above rules very faithfully, but still managed to waste my time. Better, it was even a verylengthymeeting. I won't go into too much details about what was discussed in the meeting. The problem of the meeting was not that it didn't make any decisions: it actually made decisions, lots of them. And the decisions were very sensible. However, those decisions were very obvious even before the meeting to anyone and no other decisions were even possible to be made.

I think the following should be added to the above rules to save my time.

• Don't even bother to do a meeting if only one decision can be made from it