Image via WikipediaThis is just a quick rant. Meets are a pain in the butt. I mean, sometimes it’s necessary to meet and talk about a project or get people up to speed on the latest information. We have them each week for the bloggers and our group and I usually held a network meeting each week at my last company but to have meetings to decide what will be accomplished at the next meeting is rediculous.

People who set these types of meetings up — and you know who you’re — stop it! Email and IM are great tools to collaborate while getting work done. A quick, “Who will do the research on the new cat toy?” email will do wonders. It doesn’t take blocking out 30 minutes of someone else’s time to decide on this.

Oh yeah, and when the research comes in, email it out to the group before the meeting. It’s of almost no use if people have to thumb through 30 pages of junk at a meeting table before they can even begin to speak. Archives, message boards, wikis and more are great tools that businesses and groups of people should not take lightly. They are productivity tools for a reason. They increase it.