Last year, I wrote a blog post about why I think half-hour meetings suck. You should read it first before reading this one – it’s short. Also, I still stand by a lot of it.
The tl;dr is that most things that require meetings actually take 15 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour, and that almost everything else shouldn’t be a meeting in the first place.
I am now going to elaborate and add a whole bunch of caveats.
“Networking” seems to be one of those buzzwords that everyone uses and nobody can properly define, which I find extremely annoying. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and maybe I can help offer some clarity. I’m starting to think that there might be two types of networking, which I’m going to refer to as “warm networking” and “cold networking”. If you’re familiar with the idea of “warm contacts” vs “cold contacts”, that’s where I’m borrowing this terminology from.