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Have you ever attended pointless meetings?

Madza on April 29, 2021

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

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Jelle Smeets • Apr 29 '21

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 • Apr 29 '21

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 • Apr 30 '21

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 • Apr 30 '21

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

Andy • Apr 29 '21

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

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
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.
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 • Apr 29 '21

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 • Apr 29 '21

Hahah, been there, done that 😀😀

Paweł Ciosek • Apr 29 '21

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 • Apr 29 '21

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.