What we get wrong about meetings, and how to make them worth attending
What we get wrong about meetings is scheduling meetings.  If you are blocked because you need information or you need to coordinate with someone, walk over and talk to them.  Yes, this will interrupt them, but guess what, a meeting interrupts them <i>more</i>, and it delays the unblocking of you.  If it isn&#x27;t critical, don&#x27;t interrupt them, wait until you see them free or it&#x27;s lunchtime or something, or send them an email that they can respond to when they are able, or message them on one of the 8 messaging platforms you are probably both logged into at any given time.<p>The point is that the idea that you need to have a calendar entry and a room and time set aside to talk for a minute is ludicrous and not something that you see anywhere else besides professionals who are charging for their time.<p>Just to counter obvious defenses of meetings:<p>- if it&#x27;s really worth it to take the time then scheduling it is a wasteful delay.  If it&#x27;s not worth interrupting someone briefly then it&#x27;s not worth interrupting them later via some kind of calendaring system and designated meeting place.  That is just interrupting them with a lot of extra steps.<p>- if your schedule is so booked that you need a calendar to keep all your meetings straight then you had better be a doctor or a dentist or a car mechanic or a salesman who deals with &#x27;strangers&#x27; who are paying you, because if you work in an office and are meeting with your workmates so much you need to use a computer to keep it straight you are basically wasting time and desk space and the office would be more productive if you just stopped being there.  You aren&#x27;t doing anything productive and you are actively taking up at least one productive person&#x27;s time at any given time (this isn&#x27;t strictly true, you probably spend your time in meetings with people who also spend all their time in meetings, so you are basically just passing gossip and playing politics all day), so you are literally wasting two full salaries worth of company resources and providing nothing.<p>- it&#x27;s not avoiding a disruption to schedule a meeting rather than just tapping someone on the shoulder, when you have a meeting coming up you are reminded by your phone and you are discouraged from digging into actual work because you know there&#x27;s a meeting in 20 minutes.  Then you walk to the conference room and the people using the room before you go over schedule by 10 minutes (or more, they probably started late from the previous people), so you stand around and go get coffee and chit chat and wait for the meeting to start instead of just hashing out whatever the subject is standing in the hallway outside the room.  Then you go in the room and half the time some random person is invited and you have to dial into the conference system because they stayed home that day, but you don&#x27;t want them to hear you had a meeting on subject X and didn&#x27;t invite them, and finally everyone sits there looking at their laptops and phones, respond to emails and message on slack the entire meting, and they don&#x27;t pay attention because it&#x27;s a waste of time, then some round number of minutes later you get kicked out of the room.  What would often be a 10 minute chat where the person was being completely productive up to the instant you tapped them on the shoulder has turned into an 1.5 hour long ordeal for 4 people.<p>- if there is one person assigned to figure something out, they can go chat with people 1-1 and gather information and learn about whatever the subject is, discuss options, then make decisions.  This is called &#x27;doing work&#x27;.  If nobody is actually responsible then you get everyone who might know something plus the the dummy that wants to be in every meeting because they don&#x27;t know what else to do all day and they all posture and try to show how smart they are and try to introduce their pet projects and ideas regardless of how irrelevant they are to the subject of the meeting.  Then since nobody is actually in charge you have to find some terrible consensus solution that won&#x27;t work and is pointless, so then nothing happens.