Who Called This Meeting?

I'm not a fan of excessive meetings. Most meeting requests come devoid of agendas. That's the first indication that an hour of my time is about to go up in flames.

We need to touch on the etiquette surrounding meeting start and stop times. If you schedule me to attend a meeting that starts at the exact time another meeting ends, I'm going to be early to leave or late to arrive at somebody's meeting. Seriously, I can't transport myself Star Trek style at the top of every hour. We need something akin to the between class hallway time found in most universities.

Speaking of higher education, can we get back to awarding points for participation? Everyone was invited to the meeting because they allegedly have something to add to the proceedings. If you came to the meeting, and didn't talk, you weren't at the meeting.

If I'm at your meeting, and your slides are in english, please assume that I can read them. If you're going to read off the slides word for word, it's not a presentation, it's a report. Just email it to me, and I'll email you back with any questions.

Along these same lines, if there is verbiage on the slide that I need to read, fifteen bullet points at 6 point font is probably going to be a challenge for this guy.

Whoa on that color scheme. If the background is navy blue and the text is black, Stevie Wonder and I will be seeing your presentation the same way.

Stop bar graph abuse. We all know that 230 is not twice as much as 215. But when you put these numbers next to each other on a bar graph that starts at 200 and tops out at 250, 230 looks twice as big as 215. Stop lying to my eyes.

So yes, the next time you're getting ready to fire off that meeting invite, please consider the points referenced above to avoid any meeting violations. Especially if my name appears on that invite list.