Meetup…

I’ve got an entire chapter of Nobody Told Me… The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees devoted to the nature, causes, and avoidance of meetings. Sadly, being forewarned only lets you know what you’re in for, it doesn’t automatically get you a Get-Out-of-Meeting-Free pass. It seems that no power on earth can shove a meeting off course once it has built up a sufficient degree of its own bureaucratic inertia.

Under those circumstances, you get what we’ve had here this week – which is a meeting schedule that looks something like this:

Friday Morning: Pre-Pre-Prep Meeting (1 hour)

Friday Afternoon: Pre-Prep Meeting (90 minutes)

Monday Morning: Prep Meeting Part 1 (1 hour)

Tuesday Morning: Prep Meeting Part 2 (90 minutes)

Wednesday Afternoon: Meeting (90 minutes)

Thursday Morning: Post-Meeting Meeting (90 minutes)

This is not a particularly extreme example of what takes place to in advance and following what I’ll commonly refer to as a Very Important Meeting (VIM). In this case, VIM preparation, the VIM itself, and its aftermath sucked up about 480 minutes, or eight hours. That’s one-fifth of the workweek lost to a single meeting (or one-fourth of the proposed furlough work week in case anyone at home is keeping track). I don’t even want to admit how much time gets spent scheduling, preparing slides, making sure video lines are available, and mastering the actual subject material for one of these sessions. How much time is spent preparing for and attending meetings would make the average person’s eyes water.

Look, I’m not saying that every meeting is an enormous waste of time and effort, but maybe if we could just have one or two of them instead of six, we might all be able to get a little more accomplished. Maybe I should go ahead and schedule a meeting to discuss this new and innovative concept.

You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes.