Have you ever attended pointless meetings?

All business organizations rely on meetings as an essential component of coordinating work and people, yet most of us would agree that many of these meetings are inefficient and ineffective.

Poorly organized meetings and meetings just for the matter of them being held are just two examples, where you might feel you are wasting your time and would do something more productive instead.

Have you ever come across situations like these? How did you manage to deal with those cases?

Comments

[Jelle Smeets]

A nice way to deal with poorly organized meetings, as long as your presence is not really required, is to ask for a recording of the meeting up front and watch it at 2x speed. This usually makes up for the time lost if you would attend in person.

[Madza]

Yeah, I do this with YouTube videos often if the narrator's pace is too slow or half of the info is already known 😉

[Mehmed Duhovic]

All the time. Thankfully now, with the remote thingie becoming mainstream, I code in my other window, and I finish work quicker. In 95% of time, there is nothing of value said, but project managers like to repeat nonsensical and obvious things.

[Madza]

So, "the new world order" is actually beneficial in some ways 😀😀

[Andy]

I was thinking about a couple types of blah meetings today:

1. meetings where no one seems to care - standups can feel like this sometimes, no? it's kind of like a demoralizing spiral - somehow being a little unmotivated is worse when your colleagues also are
2. poorly run meetings - it's like writing a five paragraph essay, tell us what we're doing, do it, tell us what we did; I've been to so many meetings where people jump in without laying down some pieces to make sure everyone's understanding is on the same page. and I really dislike when we don't wrap it up with action items, notes.
3. good meetings where important people are left off - seen this on siloed teams sometimes; especially if you don't have a good practice of recording, or sending out short summaries, or making an effort to loop those people in, sometimes information lives and dies in meetings.

[Kinanee Samson]

If it is a meeting that i can skip, i certainly leave immediately i realize i should be doing something else with my time. But if i can't leave.. I just start thinking about a bug I'm trying to fix on a project.

[Madza]

Hahah, been there, done that 😀😀

[Paweł Ciosek]

In my experience I always demand to end meetings with specific decisions, for example what is the next step or even to just do nothing. The worst scenario is when we end meeting with "okay we will see", "okay so we need to think about it" etc.

[Travis Fantina]

I worked for a multi-national insurance company for 18 months, so yeah I've been to pointless meetings. I'd say every meeting I attended in that 18 month period during working hours was pointless.

Ok that's too harsh, there were some meetings were valuable, only 95% were pointless.

[Madza]

meetings that could have been a mail

Yeah, I guess I forgot about these, too 😀😀

[Mohammad]

I did two this week. A completely waste of 2 hours of my week if I didn't know issues earlier and able to answer any surprise questions immediately.

[Alex Winfield]

All the time. Slay the Spire on Android is a godsend to help get through pointless "discussion".

[Andrew Baisden]

Yes and those are the meetings that I start to fall asleep in.

[Ben Halpern]

Why yes, I have.