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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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I find it interesting that "attend meetings" is said in the same breath as "walk around" and "take lunch or bathroom breaks".
Meetings are way worse for productivity than breaks and water cooler bullshitting, at least in my experience. There's more of them, they take longer, and they tend to leave me with a vague sense that nothing's really getting done and everybody's sort of okay with that. AND they're treated as an obligation in a way that taking breaks is not.
At least when I get back to my desk after walking around, I feel a bit more refreshed and ready to get back to work. In fact, it's usually meeting burnout that prompts the walk-around in the first place.
Useful meetings do exist. A lot of stuff can be lost in communication and one meeting can save a lot of time in getting everyone aligned in a short time. But figuring out when a meeting would be useful and when it's unnecessary is a skill in itself and a lot of times the people calling for meetings are not the ones who have the necessary information to make that call.
The useful meetings usually happen organically. A group of people are trying to accomplish something and at one point they decide ok, let's all get in a room / on a call together and iron this out.
That's fair. I won't dispute that sometimes they're helpful. If I spend more time typing the message than it'd take to just talk it out, then meeting up is a viable option.
But gosh, the number of meetings I've had where I send the email, we meet anyway, and I simply read the email to them and they go "Ohhhh"... Sigh.