I have to admit, I've always hated meetings, even when I was working full-time. Oh, I understood that they were important, it's just that I found frequent and long, rambling meetings extremely...unproductive. You certainly won't get a lot done if you're stuck in a meeting for over an hour.

Of course, when I started freelancing, I had fewer meetings to go to. Of course, I had to meet all-new potential clients and go to follow-up meetings for any projects, but on the whole, I've managed to avoid them. One of the worst meeting experiences I've had as a freelancer involved a very...meticulous person who wanted a website done according to his specifications, no matter how ugly the end product turned out. He would call two to three meetings a week, and each meeting lasted four to five hours. It was not an economical use of anyone's time, especially since he spent a lot of time talking about how we were all young and inexperienced, while he is older, more mature, and therefore has much more to offer than we do.

It wasn't just the meetings that took up too much time. There was also the commute, which took two hours back and forth. So that's nearly half a day wasted just for one meeting.

I didn't want to go through that sort of thing ever again, but luckily, my other clients weren't like that at all, and brief meetings in person, just to formally introduce ourselves to one another and really talk about the project, were all that took place. Otherwise, we left each other alone and communicated mostly through Y!M and e-mail. And you'd be pleased to know that it's a setup that works very well.

Clearly, in my experience at least, being able to work with clients doesn't mean having to spend hours with them in meetings. It's all just a matter of being able to communicate expectations and instructions well.

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Spend less time in meetings