Work Meetings: A Waste of Life

They truly are. I do not think there are may people out there that will disagree with the title of this blog. Frequently, we are called into meetings in order to go over things that are deemed "important" by someone who deems themselves "important" and our time, not.

At the company I work for there is a general meeting once every 3 months and, as you will soon see, this meeting can very easily be avoided. Last time we met, we spent half of our two hour meeting listening to one of our mini-bosses read a public web page to us. We all had seen this web page many times before, at the company's request, and most of us happen to be literate. The next 45 minutes were spent on our mini-boss answering questions that had just been answered in the hour long reading - a good chunk of time in these meetings is wasted on the illiterates-in-denial, who are apparently deaf as well. Only the last 15 minutes were spent on new material, such as how the company is doing. In summary, 2 hours were spent on what could have taken 15 minutes to go over, and the information discussed over the last 15 minutes could have been sent via email. Precious minutes I will never get back.

Under scrutiny my meetings seem like a big waste of time, however they do only happen once every 3 months. That's not too bad if you think of it. My sister, on the other hand, sits in conference-call meetings almost all of her day, everyday; and since she frequently works from her home, I have from time to time, while visiting her, sat in those meetings out of morbid curiosity. Let me tell you, most of them could have been condensed; probably into one sentence emails. Unfortunately for her, she too has to deal with illiterates-in-denial, and, since most of them seem to be deaf as well, on top of her 40+ weekly phone meetings she still has to go into the office a couple of times a week to explain things with hand gestures and diagrams. Absolutely amazing. Imagine if everyone learned to read, all meetings were turned into condensed emails, and we all used the saved time for vacations. For me it would not make too much of a difference, but for people like my sister it would add a few of months of vacation time per year.

One can dream.