Are You in Meeting Hell?

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
– Thomas Sowell

Remember the good ol’ days of 3 meetings a day? Before the pandemic, that was the average for most professionals.

Today, that number has increased to 5, according to at least one study. Why the extra two meetings? And even more alarming is the fact that these meetings take up more than half the average 40-day week.

Now that so many people are remote at least part of the time, meetings are being used as a stand-in for the old interpersonal connections that used to happen at the office. But the problem is, casual run-ins at the office used to be fairly brief, while meetings tend to be scheduled for standardized chunks of time.

Some of the companies I work with are reworking this old-fashioned paradigm by scheduling much shorter meetings for check-ins, or forfeiting meetings in favor of Slack conversations and other more asynchronous modes of communication.

Finding new ways to check in and communicate is important, before we all get eaten alive by meetings!