Make Meetings More Efficient: Kill the PowerPoints
There's no denying that a good PowerPoint presentation can get your point across like few other tools. Used as a crutch, however, they lose their effectiveness.
Indeed, if you pull out the projector every time you hold a meeting, it's a good bet your meetings aren't terribly efficient.
That's one of nine takeaway points Productivity501's 9 Tips for Efficient Meetings. Here's the point about PowerPoint:
PowerPoint can be a useful tool for doing training, but if you are spending a lot of time with someone at the front of a room flipping through slides, it is a sign that your meetings aren't very efficient. PowerPoint can be a good way to make sure everyone is looking at the same thing as the starting point for discussion. A good rule of thumb is seven minutes. If the person controlling the PowerPoint is talking for more than seven minutes without being interrupted or asked a question, then the information probably doesn't need to be presented in the meeting.Okay, fess up: Have you been abusing your PowerPoint privileges? Or do you think that presentations are just a necessity sometimes, efficiency be damned? As always, share your thoughts in the comments.
One other recommendation in the aforementioned post is using meetings to argue. If there's no discourse, no disagreement, then it's not a meeting at all -- it's a lecture.
With that in mind, and in honor of casual Friday, we bring you one of our very favorite videos on the subject of arguments:
Photo by Jeffrey Beall.