The Peculiar And Heinous Tedium Of Most Meetings

Why does this never seem to improve?

Almost everyone I’ve ever worked with hates meetings, or at the very least pretends to hate meetings but really likes going to them because they fill up the day and prevent real work (a-ha!), and yet despite decades now of “A meeting that could have been an email” memes, we still trudge to these things almost every day. Sometimes virtually, sometimes in-person. Whatever’s clever. Some meetings have outlasted their relevance by about six years, created because someone who no longer works at the company once dropped a ball, and some middle manager — who also no longer works at the company — decided there needed to be an “all-hands” on Monday at 11am for “accountability.” Even though this could easily be shared on Slack/Teams/etc., a whole new group of people are now destined to keep attending this meeting for another three years.

The particular tedium of the meeting culture takes many forms:

• It has the wrong people in it: Higher-level meetings tend to never have execution-level people in them, and then the higher-level people move to another meeting, then a third meeting, then a fourth meeting, so by the time they finally get back to their email, they forget what happened in the first meeting, and so they can’t give any type of action items or…