2 days ago
Imagine lying on your death bed and thinking - I've had a good run. I went to a lot of meetings
He doesn't use the term himself, but Son Number One is one of those
digital nomads
: theoretically, he can work from anywhere in the world. Realistically, it's better for him to be in the
Americas
. He works for a company based in
New York
, and his working day has to conform to those hours. He's in Ireland at the moment, but because of the time difference, he has to work until 10 or 11 at night.
But it's temporary. He'll return to that part of the world soon because he likes living there. The job suits him too – not just because it affords him mobility, but because the company is young with only a handful of employees. It is work, but it has a sense of freedom to it.
Or at least, it had.
It's a typical story of modern commerce. The small company did well, and eventually the owners were offered irresistible sums to sell. Suddenly, Son Number One found himself as the employee of a much larger corporate entity. Previously, he would communicate with the New York office when it was necessary. Everyone stuck to the point. Now he has to endure the tyranny of regular scheduled online meetings, with as many as 60 people taking part.
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He listens to people he doesn't know, and will never meet, spouting corporate word salads about other businesses that have nothing to do with him.
This is not an untypical experience. Most meetings are, at best, a waste of the working day, and at worst, an egregious, soul-sucking waste of life itself; the drone of other voices reflecting the tick-tick-tick of mortality's clock. And it's asking you: what are you doing here? Don't you realise you'll be dead soon?
You may have had this experience yourself: there's a regular meeting you have to attend, but it's not clear what the meeting is for. Invariably, there will be one or two people there who will extemporise at length; and not because there is some pressing point they need to make. They just like talking. For them, it's not a functional exchange of information, more like a bit of a chat. Meanwhile, you keep your phone in your lap, and exchange gossipy messages with people at the same meeting.
Not that meetings can't be useful, or even necessary. It's just that all too often they are meetings for the sake of it; which can result in a decision to have another meeting.
I'm far from the first person to point this out. There's any number of management guru types offering advice on how to make the system more effective. It's become something of a cottage industry, along with studies on how much time and money is wasted going to meetings. According to figures from the
US
, the majority of employees spend a third of their week at them, which in turn costs the American economy $37 billion (€31.5 billion) a year.
[
I was unfazed by a near car crash, so why does a dental visit leave me quivering?
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]
The higher up the management chain you go, the more meetings you attend: to the point, presumably, when you do nothing but attend meetings. You spend your day discussing work, but you don't actually do any.
Management gurus will argue that this is merely the result of dumb habit: all it requires is to take the (supposedly) counterintuitive step of scheduling fewer meetings. You'd wonder why so many large companies, bent on maximising productivity, haven't figured that out already.
It could be that meetings have another, unspoken function. Forcing employees to waste their time by attending reminds them who the boss is. And for those bosses, it's a display of status, a function of busyness culture: where being run off your feet is an unquestioned good; a way of marking the worth of a life. Imagine lying on your death bed and thinking: I've had a good run. I went to a lot of meetings.
