Stevea Robbins here.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

As you may know, I just love meetings.

No, no, I don't.

I hate meetings.

And the reason is that meetings are often an utter waste of time.

Perhaps the worst kind of meeting of all is the dreaded

status update meeting. My pal Bernice's new plant shop, green growing things, is doing

extremely well. Each Monday morning at 8 a.m., she has a status meeting with her staff. Her

theory is that this is a time when everyone is bright and chipper and just rare in to go. People will share their status and life will be perfect.

Status meetings don't work. There are many problems with Bernice's theory. First of all,

90% of the population isn't conscious Monday morning at 8 a.m. We've just trained ourselves

to sleep with our eyes open and to say things that sound sensible while we're really still dreaming about Oreo ice cream cake eating contests.

Plus, the status meeting is often a time when everyone spews information into the middle of the room, hoping that they choose the right information to spew, and that the unconscious Oreo ice cream cake dreaming sleep-deprived zombies around the table

are sharp enough to notice what information they need, take it, and run, well, shamble with it.

The team members who couldn't care less about that information sit by, patiently playing plants

versus zombies on their smartphones, ironic, no, until something relevant to them gets spewed out.

It doesn't have to be this way. All you need to do is figure out what communication each person

needs, and then arrange a way for them to get that information efficiently. At your next status

meeting, bring a piece of engineering graph paper.

That's graph paper with a wide first column and a tall first row, and you can use those as the

row and column labels.

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