Do you go topless to meetings? 43 Folders points to an article on MercuryNews.com about design firm Adaptive Path’s decision to ban laptops, mobiles and smartphones from all of their meetings.

Lo and behold, it worked — “It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers”, said Todd Wilkens, who’s blogged before about his war against Blackberries.

In 2006, Merlin Mann posted 9 useful tips for more productive meetings, which are listed here in brief:

1. Circulate an agenda
2. Have a theme
3. Set (and honour) times for beginning, ending, and breaks
4. No electronic grazing. Period.
5. Schedule guests - don’t have people in the room who don’t need to be there
6. Be a referee and employ a time-keeper
7. Stay on target - as soon as something’s closed, move on
8. Follow up
9. Be consistent - set a pattern for how your meetings work

The guys at BNET have another interesting suggestion — have stand-up meetings. No chairs, no falling asleep, and there’s an incentive to keep things quick.

Of course, meetings often turn out to be completely unneccessary — 37signals’ book Getting Real suggests that ‘meetings are toxic’, and points to some wise advice from Lisa Haneberg:

There are too many meetings. Push back on meetings that do not make sense or are unproductive. Only book a meeting when you have an important business issue to discuss and you want or need input, approval, or agreement. Even then, resist the urge to invite everyone and their brother – don’t waste people’s time unnecessarily.

With increased choice of communication channels — phone calls, SMS, email, IM, Twitter, Skype, and social network sites like DOPPLR — you’d think we’d get better at optimising our communication. What’s the best way to contact someone with a particular question, or to discuss a particular subject? How can I reach this person most easily?

Each communication channel has obvious advantages and disadvantages — the synchronicity required for a phone or Skype call vs. the immediacy and speed at which conversation can happen; the tiny keypad for SMS vs. the convenience of quick messages on the go; the ignorability of IM vs. its flexibility in multi-participant conversations. And yet we still don’t seem very good at getting it right. I still find myself drawn into long SMS conversations which would have taken half the time and would have been doubly useful as a voice call. I call people when a quick chat message on Skype would have done the same job without interruption.

And yes, I end up having meetings where any or all of the above would have been preferable. The meeting seems like a fallback option; a safe bet. It’s all too easy to send out one of those invite emails and drag people to a table somewhere with a flipchart. There’s nothing you can’t resolve with a good meeting. And hey, if you didn’t resolve things, just schedule another one…