Cancel all your room reservations!

If there is one thing common to every big company I have ever coached, it is the lack of available meeting rooms. Getting people together is hard enough. Getting a meeting room is impossible!

This does not mean there aren’t meeting rooms in the company. Just that most have them have been booked in repeating weekly, bi-weekly or monthly events.

So just setting up a retrospective or other similar event can be a major challenge. Last time I did it, the group assistant spent a few hours finding me a room.

I have a modest proposal: Let’s make February 1st, ‘Cancel all your room reservations’ day! Cancel all your recurring meetings, free the rooms (and your calendar). Then on Tuesday, schedule only those meetings that you really need (who really needs these meetings in the first place?) and no more than 3 recurring events on a single appointment.

Is this a realistic suggestion? Of course not! Is the scarcity of meeting rooms trying to tell you something? Absolutely! You are wasting too much time in meetings!