Another crap meeting to go to

God, I gotta go into another frickin' meeting in about 15 minutes. I'm currently in the middle of writing up some project documentation and because part of that work involves distilling, interpreting, and paraphrasing bits and pieces of information scattered across emails and hare-brained PowerPoint "communication packs", it takes quite a bit of concentration to perform. So that is why after coming back from lunch and with fifteen minutes left 'til that meeting, here I am writing a blog instead. It doesn't make sense to me to get a train of thought going only to be interrupted by having to go off to that crap meeting.

Indeed, this is another instance of the kind of outrageous waste that unnecessary meetings cause. They not only take up the time representing the duration of the meeting itself, they also take up participants' wind-down and wind-up time, not to mention the time it takes to actually physically move one's arse from one's desk to the meeting venue. Add to that the crap sense of punctuality here and you've got aggregate corporate waste in the tens of millions of man-hours per year.

If only people read and understand stuff, perhaps 80% of the time we spend in meetings will be freed up for more productive work -- or possibly get us out the door of our office at 5 pm sharp more often.