Parkinson’s law of triviality. Also known as the bike-shed effect, this law
states that organizations spend the most time on trivial issues and the least time
on the most important issues. The story goes that a committee must make several
decisions related to an expensive nuclear power plant. The approval of the power
plant goes quickly with little input because it’s too complicated of a topic for
most participants to weigh in on. Yet when it comes to deciding on the design of
the bike shed for the staff, since everyone understands the trivial project, great
time is spent nitpicking and debating it.
Meetings break up the day in illogical ways and may interfere with flow or
peak concentration times.
The wrong people dominate meetings. By their nature, the overconfident
and the extroverts tend to dominate the communication in a meeting—at the
expense of others who may know more but are less inclined to share a meeting
format.
The Mark Cuban Meeting Rule
I reached out to hundreds of highly successful people as I was doing research for
this book. By design, I was trying to contact the most successful people on the
planet, and knowing that they only have 1,440 minutes a day, it never surprised
me when people didn’t respond to me.
What
did surprise me was when billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban
responded to my email only 61 minutes after I sent it.
In his typical direct and to-the-point style, Cuban’s time management advice
described his approach to meetings.
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