In defense of standing meetings

I'm guilty of reading a good deal of life-hacker style productivity writing at times when I probably should be doing something productive. Some of it has really helped, like the GTD approach of sending all my loose ends to collect in one system where I can routinely sort out and prioritize them. But I'm increasingly convinced that some of it doesn't have a place in a school building--or at least not in my building.

Last year, I took a job that dropped my teaching load down to one class. Meetings are a much bigger part of the new job: committee and task force meetings, one-on-one meetings with colleagues, meetings with parents, meetings with our senior administrators. Somewhere along the line I picked up a piece of advice against standing meetings, and I believed it. I suspect we've all spent our share of meetings wondering about the meeting's purpose. I told myself I wouldn't schedule standing meetings with my department: we'd meet when we have reason to meet. 

But there's more than one problem with this approach. On a very practical level, it ignores the reality that, while my schedule may be very flexible, others' still aren't. Most educators already are scheduled lock-tight into a rotation of class periods that leaves them precious little time to plan and grade, let alone take a breath or eat lunch. That puts us in conflict with another of my precepts: you make your priorities by scheduling them. If I'm not scheduling standing meetings, I'm not prioritizing my collaborative work with colleagues--nor am I signaling to them that I prioritize it and that they should too. 

The problem remains, then, how do we avoid needless standing meetings? I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while. What do you think?