I stumbled across this awesome video interview at Big Think with Jason Fried, Co-founder of 37Signals yesterday. Take a moment to watch it and come back.

Much of what he is talking about is a reference to their Getting Real, “Meetings Are Toxic” essay.

After mulling over the points from the essay and what Mr. Fried mentions in the interview, I thought of one thing that neither the book or the interview points out; If meetings disrupt work-flow, when do meetings actually become necessary? Certainly, we can’t go through a workweek without having one or two meetings that are either focused on employee relations or the company budget right? Every indented point made in the essay covers why you shouldn’t call a meeting, but, are there some general rules we can follow on why you should call a meeting?

My thoughts on this subject relate to a set of rules to follow when working on designing a new piece of functionality for a web app. They are as follows:

1. Why are we building this?
2. Who needs it?
3. Will it generate more revenue?

Now, take those three rules and apply it to scheduling a meeting:

1. Why are we meeting?
2. Who needs to be in the meeting? (If you made it to this step can you use electronic communication instead?)
3. Will the meeting subject be about employee/customer relations, revenue, etc.

The third point, I feel, should be a rule (or rules combined) that needs modification for different situations and be unique to the company in question. What I mean by that is it should really be the absolute and final reason to call the meeting because it can affect two of the most important parts of the company; your employees or your customers. If you make it to that third rule then yes, this meeting is probably important. If you didn’t make it past rule one, forget it. But, if you made it to rule two you should still ask yourself “Can I communicate the matter through email or instant messaging instead?”

I understand that not all situations fall under these three rules and they should be taken with a grain of salt. There are planning meetings, budget review meetings, and annual reviews, all of which can have a lot of value depending on the organization of them, but, I think the manner of how 37Signals presents the topic of removing distractions should never be forgotten.

For those of you who haven’t read the entire Getting Real book it’s a short (and free) read. If you’ve already read it, I suggest going back and reading it again.