Meetings, Meetings – Who Wants a Meeting?

I had to spend my entire morning today in meetings – I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing all day. Meetings are okay if they’re a) useful and b) productive, but usually I find that they’re neither. So I try to avoid them if I can. Alas, today I wasn’t so fortunate.

I know people who looooove meetings, however. My manager Skippy Whitebread is one of them. He literally has scheduled 30 – 32 hours of meetings EVERY WEEK. Seriously. His Outlook calendar is continually blocked out for some stupid conference call or a pointless get-together down the hall. It’s damn near impossible to pin him down on anything because he’s always on his way to or from another meeting. Most of the meetings he sits in on really don’t apply to our team, or if they do, the portion that does takes up about 5 minutes of the entire time in there. But there he goes anyway – Mr. Bureaucrat putting his nose into every possible scenario within the company. I really think he attends mainly to keep from doing Real Work. If you’re in a meeting you don’t have to worry about catching up on other projects.

Imagine how much more productive this country would be if half of its available labor force wasn’t sitting in a dank conference room rehashing minutia that most people couldn’t care less about and really doesn’t have much of an affect on the rest of the world. Why, we might be able to solve all the world’s woes with that combined energy.

We’d just have to get them out of that room first...