How many of you have calendars that are blocked on blocks of unavailability where every moment from 8 am to 5 pm is blocked with some meeting or another?
Or maybe instead of a bunch of 1-hour meetings, you have “Death by a Thousand” Meetings where your day is sliced and diced into 50 small, half-hour meetings that will not take up much time but destroy any chance of productivity you might have throughout the day?
Whichever way your calendar looks, you are not getting any work done when you’re sitting in a meeting.
Before it gets said, meetings do not work, meetings are discussions, workshops, and problem-solving sessions that drive work to be completed. They are a necessity, but when you are overloaded in your need to attend them, you will not be getting any work done.
Death by a Thousand Meetings
Every calendar app now asks you if you truly need that hour for that meeting. I don’t know why this is, perhaps so you can have another 15 minutes of downtime before the next meeting in which case how does your need for downtime (perfectly acceptable) have any bearing or impact on the duration required to solve a problem at a meeting?
They don’t — they are two completely unrelated variables.
