Get 50% more life - cut hours to 40 minutes!

Parent Cafe
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<p>It occurred to me the other day after a morning plagued by wasted time that all meetings are scheduled in increments of an hour, whether they take an hour or not. People may schedule a meeting to start on the half-hour, but no one ever schedules a half-hour meeting. When you don’t have a full hour’s content, you typically go ahead and meet for an hour. Then someone usually brings the meeting to an end by saying “Well, the hour’s about up.”</p>

<p>If we cut each hour to 30 minutes, it wouldn’t help - people would just schedule “two-hour” meetings so that they could go more than 30 minutes. But what if we cut them to 40 minutes creating 36 hours each day? That’s close enough to an hour that most of the conventional reasons for which people gather for an hour could fit. Then, we’d hustle through meetings instead of dragging them out. People say they’d like to have more hours in their day - cutting some of the wasted time out of your day is about the same thing.</p>

<p>Sounds crazy, I know, but Ben Franklin invented daylight-savings time, and that must’ve sounded pretty weird at the time too. What do you think?</p>

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<p>The other factor it the ‘weekly meeting’ whereby the meeting is scheduled to occur at the same time each week whether it’s really needed then or not.</p>

<p>Another factor is the ‘concall’ whereby everyone with the remotest possibility of involvement with the subject, no matter how minor, is invited regardless of their location. The sub-factor here is that with so many people on the call, there are always a couple that feel the need to speak up even when they shouldn’t thereby wasting time and not getting the work completed thereby warranting (in some people’s minds) the need for another concall.</p>

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<p>Well, I’ve always thought I could use more hours in a day… :p</p>

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<p>The classic Psychoanalyst hour has already been cut to 50 minutes</p>

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<p>Now that you mention it, the world of higher ed has led the way - the academic creit hour has always been 50 minutes! (But the other 10 minutes after class are reserved for the cell phone.)</p>

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<p>Speaking of meetings, new words for the corporate world- (I posted this before a while back, sorry if everyone’s read it already)</p>

<ol>
<li>BLAMESTORMING
Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.</li>
</ol>

<p>2.SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves. </p>

<p>3.ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard .</p>

<p>4.SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end. </p>

<ol>
<li>CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles.</li>
</ol>

<p>6.PRAIRIE DOGGING : When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.</p>

<ol>
<li>MOUSE POTATO : The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato. </li>
</ol>

<p>8.SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids. </p>

<p>9.STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.</p>

<p>10.SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use. </p>

<p>11.XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace. </p>

<p>12.IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are Annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. </p>

<ol>
<li><p>PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again. </p></li>
<li><p>ADMINISPHERE : The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve. </p></li>
<li><p>404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.</p></li>
<li><p>GENERICA : Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>17.OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake). </p>

<p>18.WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks. </p>

<ol>
<li>CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.</li>
</ol>

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<p>I guess maybe I’m aspiring to be a Woof.</p>

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<p>Doubleplay’s list is both funny and frightening!</p>

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<p>we used to have 45 minute meetings at my work… they then became 30 minutes, then went back to 45 minutes. we have since changed them to 1 hour meetings because we constantly were running out of time. every once in a blue moon we run out of things to do prior to the hour being up, but not very frequently. I have a feeling once it gets to be our busy season we will be back to 45 or 30 minute meetings again. with a quick standup meeting here and there totalling 15-30 minutes to go over whatever wasn’t covered in the shortened meeting.</p>

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<p>With two kids at two different colleges, I’ve learned that a 10:00 class may start at 10 and end at 10:55 or so and another one can start at 10:05 and end at 11 (or in some cases, when the prof has decided to end it while students from the next class keep opening doors). </p>

<p>Since nature abhors a void, there’s always something to fill up a 30-minute, one-hour-, 90-minute or two-hour meeting. One former boss, as we thought the meeting was about to be concluded, would say, “Anyone else wants to speak up? Is there any objection that we have not heard yet?” And everyone would start all over again to debate something that had already been agreed upon. He thought he was practicing democracy. He used to drive some of us nuts.</p>

<p>I love Doubleplay’s list!</p>