80/20’ing your meetings – Mike Crittenden

I'm a big fan of the Pareto principle. I'm also a big fan of Sturgeon's law. Both of them boil down to the same idea: most of the value of a set of things comes from a small portion of that set. Take meetings, for example. There are two ways you could take this:

• A few of your meetings are much more valuable than all the rest, or:
• You could make each meeting much shorter without losing much value

Both of those are debatable in practice, but it's a fun exercise in intense intervention.

While I agree in theory, I think the problem with this sort of approach is that, while—per Sturgeon—90% of everything may be crap, you don’t know which 10% is the good stuff until you’ve gone through it all.