Rituals

I'm running a reading group at my company once every two weeks. We start at 9:00 AM, while most of the employees (including me) arrive at 9:30 on normal basis. We move tables around, bring croissants and make the meeting room ours for the following two hours. During yesterday's session, we've been discussing about whether this decorum was important, and what it meant to us. I'm now understanding more clearly what was just an intuition few months ago, when I designed the logistics for this reading group.

When you organize a recurring meeting or workshop, it's important to create some ritual that makes it different from the rest of what the group members do on their regular workday. It helps to remind everyone that they're meeting for specific, special reasons. That while it's ok to shift priorities around and change plans the rest of the time, the time on which the group has agreed to meet escapes the common rules and shall stay protected.