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Meetings are Bad For You
19061969 writes "Though this is obvious to most of us, your PHB's might benefit from knowing that meetings are bad for you. Two psychologists have found evidence that the number of and the time spent in meetings has a detrimental effect on mood. "...a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and subjective workload was found", write the authors after conducting a diary study. Perhaps we should be more understanding with our moody bosses?"
Bollocks. Meeting are held for a reason - and usually an important one to which mood can step back for. The submission title presents meetings as bad overall, while the article says -too many- meetings are bad. elynnia
"Perhaps we should be more understanding with our moody bosses?"
Perhaps not. Most meetings are scheduled by said moody bosses because they can't be bothered to read their email or meet one on one with the people who are actually getting work done. Sure, they're busy otherwise, but most of the reason they're busy is because of this meeting culture that equates sitting around a table talking about what you're going to have your minions do (as soon as they get out of the meetings you force them into) with getting code written and products shipped.
The main reason I hate meetings so much is because I get the impression that the only people getting anything out of them are the ones contributing nothing useful to the project in the first place. I don't care if your job is to sit between me and your boss, if you can't keep up with a project you're a part of without dragging me away from my actual work to hand-hold you through what's going on twice a week, you're wasting my time.
That was 90% of the meetings last place I worked, and this accounted for probably half the reason I got fed up with the place and quit before Christmas. Maybe I'm just not cut out to work somewhere that has more than a few employees, and I've never claimed to be a people person, but everybody I talked to felt much the same way, so I feel at least somewhat validated.
Face to face contact is great, but the instances where that face to face contact's value outweighs the cost of herding a bunch of people into a conference room for a chit chat are few and far between when there are deadlines to meet, IMHO.
Game... blouses.
While number of meetings is important, I think that spending all day, every day in your office with no idea what anyone else is doing could be just as detrimental. I go to like 3 meetings a month so it takes me forever to find out what other people are doing.
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You need a balance of meetings.
Key is to not invite non-Stakeholders. Certain meetings are needed for people to feel empowered to produce and cetrain meetings just make people wither on the vine. What you want to accomplish at the meeting?
when I have meetings with my phd supervisors I usually enjoy them a lot. if you're discussing something with funny, intelligent experts who help you get things done it's not surprising it's enjoying.
so don't blame meetings. I expect most meetings are bad for you just because most *people* are stupid, boring, selfish, ignorant, incompetent and more likely to get in your way than not.
I have found that one meeting a week is sufficient; I tell people where I'm at on what I'm working, what my schedule looks like, and to remind them to provide me with concise details for any projects they may have upcoming. Past that, the odd development meeting where I might have to collaborate with someone, but the fact is you should only ever really have to have one meeting to determine who does what, and then actually give them the time to do it.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
You hit the nail on the head. It's not that meetings are a waste - they aren't. It's that too many ppl schedule wasteful time in their meetings. If you can complete your objectives of the meeting in 15 minutes -- then adjourn and let ppl get back to work.
I've sat in too many meetings that went an hour simply because they were scheduled for that long. Most of the time, the information could have been covered in 15 min or less and the meeting leader winds up "filling" the extra time with mindless bantering and/or information.
As a project mgr, I used to go by the "say what you have to say and be done" philosophy. As such, my meetings hardly ever lasted more then 30 min. And the people on my team actively told me that this style was effective and a nice relief from the normal "schedule an hour" routine.
Quite apart from the objective question of how useful a meeting is, there is an orthogonal dimension: whether a given person is temperamentally suited to meetings.
It seems to me that extraverts (who tend to predominate in sales, marketing, and the upper strata of management) are obviously going to enjoy the atmosphere of a meeting far more than introverts (who tend to predominate in programming and other nose-to-the-metal jobs). Other things being equal, an extravert actually gains energy from being with a bunch of other people, whereas an introvert may feel her will to live gradually draining away.
Disclaimer: this is a broad generalization, and there are plenty of exceptions - introverted sales stars, extraverted developers, etc. That actually confuses the issue even further, as the extraverted developer may be the one who enjoys meetings and can't see what the rest of the team are bellyaching about.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
From the looks of your user number you are pretty new. For those of us who have been around a while, this is THE technical forum--even if it's not so much any more, respect the tradition.
Sorry, this is too general a statement to be made from this study. Factories are another location where meetings improve mood.
In offices, where people tend to be professionals, the staff would rather continue working (doing what they do best) than sit around in a meeting. In factories, where people are doing the same thing over and over, meetings are a wonderful break from the routine.
That way you don't clog everyone elses day by asking the same questions that has been answered by these people 200 times already.
I don't know what kind of meetings you go to, but this is exactly WHY they have sales meetings. Instead of having all those people running around making their own interpretations about the product, coming to possibly different conclusions, or getting incomplete information, then having to contact the vendor and clarify, they get them all into one room and do it all at the same time. Meet with 100 salesmen in-duh-vidually, or meet with all 100 at once, so they can hear others questions as well as their answers? Not a tough choice.
I'm not in sales, and I'm not a giant fan of meetings, however the ones I do attend are mainly for me and my team and not a soapbox for the management. Its how they can convey team-oriented progress to us without having to meet with the 20+ of us separately and say the same thing to everyone. Fortunately the area where I work has a manager that is aware of when a meeting is not necessary, and they get cancelled or ended early often when they are not productive or when someone has more important work to do.
Nobody asked you to like meetings. Some are helpful, some are a waste of time. Its part of the job.
And they said zombies weren't real!
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To do collaborative work. If two or three people need to agree on an interface, they can either go through a zillion iterations by email, or they can just sit down in front of a whiteboard and argue until they're done with the whole thing. I've seen design discusssions that should have been done in an afternoon take a week or more because someone flat-out refused to have a meeting about it.
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Some things just need to be said in front of everyone else. In particular, publicly confessing your planned schedule in front of your colleagues may not be good for your soul, but it's certainly good for ensuring that it gets done.
I'll point out that both of these are stressful activities. They're just easier in the long run than the non-meeting-based alternatives that I know of.