Escaping the Corporate Hell of Too Many Meetings

Issue #7 🧩 The typical work calendar 🧩 Our brains with back-to-back meetings all day 🧩 The cost and value of meetings 🧩 How to unclutter our calendars

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Photo by Memento Media on Unsplash

You look at your calendar and it’s a mess! On top of having too many things to do, you also have too many meetings to attend, they take up all of your days, you’re even double- and triple-booked at times. And while you’re trying to at least resolve the scheduling conflicts, more meeting invites appear for those same times. Of course, everything is urgent and of the highest priority, and everyone wants you and no one else.

How do you remain sane and deal with all this?

Keep reading 👇

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📑 NOTE: Treat my posts like mini-guides: choose what’s relevant or interesting.

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📆 The Typical Work Calendar

The screenshots below are a real-life example extracted from the calendar of a Software Development employee:

Unfortunately, this example is not specific to the particular person, company, or even industry. Nowadays, pretty much everyone in any industry has back-to-back meetings every day.

Notice that the person is not only double-, but also triple-, and even quadruple-booked at times (when we include the all-day meeting). So here’s what I’m wondering:

1. If a person is booked for two or more meetings at the same time, how do they know which one to attend? Maybe one meeting has a higher priority, or maybe the person is more needed in another, etc. There are no decision-making criteria - it’s all left to the individual to figure out.

2. Even more importantly, if a person is fully booked for the whole workday, at which point do they get to do the tasks they were hired to do (which should also be the tasks that are presumably inputs to or outputs from those meetings)?

3. What is the value these meetings bring to the business? We can calculate how much they cost, apart from the psychological impact of disruption, context-switching, etc., which is very hard to put into numbers. However, can we estimate the value-add?

4. Is there a way to improve the meeting format, minimize their number, or eliminate them altogether? And (keeping pt.3 in mind) what would that look like?

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🥴 Meeting Fatigue

What’s happening to our brains when we have back-to-back meetings all day?