I sat through an hour long meeting this week where the final decision was that we wouldn’t do anything.
To make things worse, this wasn’t the first meeting on the topic. I’d already wasted an hour and a half listening to everyone talk about nothing the week before.
The sad thing is I could have predicted the final outcome of the meetings and saved us all some time. The room was packed, it’s crazy to think how much money was spent on the salaries of all the people in the room for those two meetings.
It seemed that I was the only one who could see how ridiculous the situation was. No one else seemed to mind that we’d wasted all that time discussing something that was a foregone conclusion. I’m sure if I could have sent a bill for my hourly rate to everyone in the meeting it would have been much shorter and probably not happened at all.
Riding the Tidal Wave of Useless Meeting Invites
One of the dangers of working for a corporation is that anyone with access to Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes can try and ensnare you in a useless meeting about nothing with only a click of their mouse. There typically aren’t “best practices” for a meeting setup, everyone’s always so willing to waste your time with another meeting request.
Of course, you do have the power of the decline button. To keep yourself sane and productive, your default response to any meeting request should be Decline. If it really is important they’ll follow up with you personally and you can screen the meeting on your waste of time meter.
We all know that despite sending multiple Decline messages, we’ll still get roped sooner or later into some meetings that just waste hours of our lives. The best way to break free of these worthless meetings is to just leave the corporation. Take yourself out of that wasteful environment.