I’m not sure if I’ve shared my super good method for meeting effectiveness before (as if that were possible in the first place), but I thought it worth mentioning now that I’m back from my little vacation and I have some meetings to attend:

Before the meeting starts all participants should slap each other in the face. Not excessively hard. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being a slap that would make someone cry and walk around the rest of the week with a shiner, you should give slaps in the 3-6 range.

The slapping is good for a lot of reasons:

It gets your adrenaline pumping. When we were cave men and women, we used to beat chests, claw at each other for the best spears, and then rush off and take down mighty mastodons. We don’t get to do that any more, but our bodies want to. Adrenaline helps you think a bit better.

It’s also a morale booster. You’re not just having a meeting, you’re having a thoughtful sit down with people you just spent some time slapping in the face. These are your friends, people you’d let slap you in the face, and people you swung your arm at so that your hand would connect with their, arguably, most important body parts.

And finally, it gives meetings a purpose (something all meetings that don’t start with slapping lack). If you’re just gathering in a room without slapping, there’s no adrenaline pumping. There’s no “we’re going to take down a herd of mastodons” sort of feeling. It’s just a bunch of people digesting their lunches that they didn’t even have to hunt for or even pull out of the dirt. They’re all thinking about something other than the meeting, rather than “that was a pretty good smack I gave Stu from Accounting, and boy, his slap got me riled up alright – we’re ready to tackle some important issues now aren’t we.”

Slap your fellow meeters please.