Lunchtime Thoughts: I Hate Meetings
I’ve been stuck in meetings all morning and I guess I’ll be stuck in them much of the afternoon as well, so my thought for the day is about how painful/redundant/pointless many meetings actually are.
Meetings
37 Signals write, in their book Getting Real, that meetings are toxic and I could not agree more with that.
In this agile world we live and work in, where a website can be built in a couple of days, why do traditional meetings still exist?
- Hardly any real information is relayed, compared to the time they take.
- Too many abstract words like solution and integrate, people talking lots but never really saying anything.
- Miscommunication and lack of direction slows the whole process down even more
Often it feels like rather than talking and talking about it, actually getting down to the tough stuff and working through the problems could be done in less time than a meeting where you discuss how you are going to go about solving the problem.
What am I trying to say? Not much really, I’m just ranting about how I feel I’m loosing/wasting a lot of time sitting in meetings that rarely ever amount to much.
My lunch today was a cajun chicken wrap, peperami and a heart-shaped strawberry donut
Spot on Andrew, couldn’t agree with you more … now multiply that apathy with meetings by a factor of 10 in my office [ Architects, by the way ] where we seem to have meetings to organise meetings, or group discussions in order to formulate agenda for further discussions, it drives me insane it really does. Incidentally you hardly ever post anything on flickr anymore, have you moved on to something else?
Si Bate on February 7, 2008 5:18 pm
I’ve not been posting on flickr mainly because I’ve not been taking any photos, over xmas I didn’t have the internet or go out that much so I didn’t really do much with the net as a whole.
Trying to catch up on it all now tho
Andrew on February 7, 2008 5:34 pm