Don't Invite Me to Your Meetings!

All employees need to hear this.

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I hope this will not come across too much like bragging, but I have been invited to a lot of office meetings. Most of this is because—and, again, sorry to brag—I have a job that I show up to pretty regularly. The experience of being in the office for eight-hour intervals is not any less startling or unsettling when you spend the majority of that time stuck in a brainstorm or a get-together or a presentation or a planning session, especially since these meetings favor tone and tedium over pace. And it seems like the key attribute that allows people to thrive in these meetings—and make it up the corporate ladder—is acting like a precocious doofus while saying possibly false company-related stuff in a way that favorably inclined observers find compelling. This kind of dexterity and confidence can get you pretty far in playing office politics, especially compared to the long-gone cynics who grit through two-hour briefs that drag on 90 minutes longer than necessary, but all the oratorial pomp and meticulously designed decks can’t change the fact that there are too many meetings and they’re all poorly timed.

Meetings almost always run over time, which is a statement that would scan as a positive if you have never been to a meeting. Upon an initial impression, it would seem like we’re taking an extra few minutes for due diligence and detailed questions, but in practice, it’s because all the attendees were five minutes late to the meeting because their previous meeting ran five minutes over because the meeting before that ran five minutes over, which renders the first 10 minutes of most meetings to be completely pointless. There is a lot of blocked time on my Outlook calendar serving some evident purpose, and the sequence of meetings is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure.

And I knew all of this from watching Office Space, or thought I knew it. But I was not ready for how this would feel, and it increasingly seems targeted directly at my own personal neuroses and manias. I know that all these ultra-dyspeptic meetings are a boondoggle—I can’t give any of my supervisors a status of the work they expect me to complete because we’re having so many meetings about a certain project that I can’t actually work on said project unless I commit myself to consistently grinding during vampire hours of the week.

I get caught up in the astonishingly grim prospect of mentally pivoting from back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings about a variety of topics, and sometimes I forget that no one ever asks me questions or needs my input. Whenever a virtual call sucks in a way that has everyone on camera making Oh brother faces, I’ll Slack other people in the meeting to coordinate happy hour plans. I have seen people scramble to explain to me some haphazard reason for why they’re going off-camera in the middle of a call, which is unnecessary because I genuinely don’t care. I’m also not paying full attention in most meetings because I’m doing something for another meeting so I’ll have something to update for the next meeting.

Someone I’ve worked with has suggested including a voting button with every calendar invite: Should this be an email or a meeting? In theory, most meetings could be condensed into an email; in practice, people don’t read their emails, so we have to have a meeting to review everything that was in the email. One time, at an agency I used to work for that had an open office concept, I strolled by what was apparently an every-morning regroup where everyone involved sits in a circle, passes around a talking stick, and stands up to say one thing they love about their client, Wal-Mart. That isn’t even as absurd as Agile/Scrum rituals, which are meetings about how to optimize meeting productivity, which then spirals into quarterly planning about the planning of planning meetings.

The older I get and the more I get paid, the less work I actually do and the more I just languish and waste away in meetings with other managers while we deliberate over the best way to start working. My supervisor empowers me to decline meetings that I decide are unnecessary (which, at a baseline, are anything after 1 PM on Fridays), but whenever I do, the host will spam my Slack with interrogations about why I rejected their invite and my earliest convenience for when I can reschedule. If American businesses could get a hold of their meeting sickness, maybe they can afford to give their staff a reasonable amount of PTO. Until that happens, here is a reasonable rule of thumb: Meetings should be Zooms, Zooms should be emails, and emails should be fistfights in the parking lot after HR goes home at 5:06 PM.

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