So I’m sitting in a meeting but it is not a meeting. The clock reads 1:04 and the meeting should have started at 1:00. No one else is here, so I check my calendar to ensure that I am in the right place. I’ve got the right room and right time but am alone nonetheless. I’m used to people being late, but the whole contingent of 8 people are missing from the meeting. By the way, it is now 1:07.

How long should I wait? It reminds me of the old rule of thumb we had in college concerning waiting for a professor who was late for class. As I recall a class would wait 5 minutes for an assistant professor, 10 minutes for an associate professor, 15 minutes for a full professor. If the lecture was to be given by a teaching assistant the wait would be about 2 minutes. But I am still alone at 1:09.

How much longer should I wait is now becoming less significant and I am wondering if I should declare myself a quorum and make some decisions. Well, the reason I do not do that is because the meeting is one of the overwhelming majority of meetings where no decisions are usually made. Ideas will be bounced around, complaints vetted and tasks assigned. Then another meeting would be scheduled to see who actually completed their assignments. Actually I could do something. I could task everyone with other action items as if the meeting had occurred. So at 1:13, lucky thirteen, I started writing up assignments for the absent members. By 1:15 I had finished the action items and before I pack up and leave a bunch of the committee members arrive and I tuck my action item list away and greet the tardy attendees.

At 2:47 the late starting 1:00 meeting concludes. What struck me most is the action items from the meeting very closely matched the made up ones I had decided upon and they matched in that I had assigned them to the same people who ended up with them. The only two exceptions were the two action items I got stuck doing from the real meeting whereas I did not assign any tasks to myself.

The take home message I get from this is that any 1.5 hr meeting can be replaced by spending 10 minutes of creative delegating.