If you have been following my blog for a while now, you likely know my perspective on meetings. I think most workplaces have too many meetings. I think meetings can be great, most of them result in egoistic chatter. I believe this to be especially true at big corporations…meetings are a huge huge time/money sink and often an amplification of inefficiency.
I am writing this essay as I was sparked by a professor who quickly (and I believe wrongly) countered my claim that “1.5 hour lectures are too long. I would very very rarely try to schedule a 1.5 hour meeting at work” with the idea that “what?! Jordan, you will have to learn that in the real world we have long meetings all the time. It is just something you have to do…sometimes we would have 3 day long meetings!”
Remind you that this professor has been out of the workplace for a few years now, but I mean no disrespect in thinking, I think this view is what is typical of the older generation.
Meetings are not necessarily productivity sessions. A busy calendar is not the goal. I think the world needs less meetings not more. We need more deep focus time to unlock our flow state. We need less open offices and more us time. We need more time to actually work and less time on slack, less time switching between tabs, less wavering…more doing!
I make this strong case as I hope to spend time in an environment where unblocking focus is a high priority…not politics and status quo.