The Perfect Meeting

The invite

An invite appears in your inbox for a meeting that’s due to start in two minutes. After some initial confusion (‘surely not!’), you open the invite, ignoring the fact you have another meeting in half an hour, creating an overlap. The organiser has clearly not checked your diary.

And why is this new meeting scheduled to last two hours anyway? The invite title gives no clue. Best of all, there’s no agenda or meeting plan.

So, what to do next.? Well, you could ignore the invite. The problem with this is it might come back to haunt you in some way; it’s not great for relationships; and it’s passive-aggressive.

Or, you could go along. Or write and ask for clarification on the point, or refuse until there’s an agenda and you understand your expected role.

But it’s starting in one minute, so you decide to go along and show good faith. There’s almost certainly time to get a coffee and go to the toilet first though, because most other people will be late, and important people have probably decided not to bother at all. And surely there will be technical problems. In fact, there’s no point turning up to it until about seven minutes after the start, which is lucky because you got talking to someone at the coffee machine. Which isn’t working as it’s being cleaned.

The meeting

And now you’re in the right room. It’s late, there’s no agenda, you’ve not even got a coffee, but you’re here, and there are other people too. Lots of them. More than seems necessary for any meeting where something needs to be achieved. Time to do some work. First thing’s first, the meeting organiser needs to get PowerPoint going, and then spend another two or three minutes problem-solving while asking, ‘can everyone see my screen? What about now?’.

It’s about to begin in earnest, and you’re already starting to miss that coffee. Oh well. Here goes. But then another hiccup: you see the presentation before it is put into presentation mode, and there’s nearly a hundred slides. One hundred slides! You wonder if there’s an opportunity to pop out for that coffee, but no, we’re good to go. A hundred slides might be manageable, you think. If it’s like a Pecha Kucha, with just pictures. First slide up: a title slide, featuring three acronyms, of which only one you know. You look around. Everyone appears to be ok with it, best to not ask. Meanwhile, the presenter goes off on one. You start to drift off, but there’s always hope it will get better. Then you see the next slide: it’s a fucking disaster. Words fill the top half of the screen: at least a million of them. The bottom part of the slide is this weird colour matrix with lots of things flowing into and out of it. And another three acronyms. Different ones. But it’s ok! Because the presenter stops to chuckle, and apologises for it being so busy! That’s ok then, maybe he’ll skip past it. But no. He goes through it in painstaking detail, line by line.

One by one, people in the room drop off. There’s a diligent person to your left who appears to be looking at the presenter, but after a while, when you realise, and everyone realises, that every slide is a variation on the same thing, you see that she’s actually staring just past the presenter and like everyone else: she’s gone.

A thousand things flit through your mind. Did you take your bins out? Actually, is it the right day for the bins? Actually yeah it is, because it’s back to normal now. It changed over the break and for a couple of weeks they were out of sync. There’s a few things that need to go out for the next week; remember to take that box apart so it will fit in the recycling. What happens if you put non-recyclable material in the recycling bin? Does someone actually go through it and pick it out? That must be a frustrating job…

Oh no, the presenter is looking at you expectantly. You take a thoughtful pause. The presenter answers his own question, so you nod at him powerfully. Thank god! That was close! Must pay more attention. Heart rate going, you now have to worry about being asked again. You look intently at the presenter. He has one of the buttons undone on his shirt. He has a dark vest on and it’s visible; it contrasts strikingly with his white shirt. Need to remember to do that as well actually; the black shirt you’ve had for a while is a bit faded but might last. Maybe in a couple of months a new black shirt will be needed, after payday. Maybe black isn’t the way to go; after all, it did fade, whereas a white one wouldn’t. Maybe a pink one, though that requires some courage. Possibly a green one…

…some time later…

It’s rolling up to half an hour into the meeting. By and large one person has been talking the whole time. You’ve tried to concentrate, and at times have paid attention. And you know for definite you don’t want to work at a recycling plant. It’s a good opportunity to leave as you have another meeting; you close the notepad you so optimistically opened at the beginning and draw the curtain on the blank page that’s been staring back at you for the last thirty minutes.

You stand up to go, and everyone looks at you, jolted out of their daydreams. The looks are now envious as you mutter some excuse about another meeting. The presenter says they will email you with some details and catch up another time. You say you can’t wait. No one smiles.

The aftermath

You’re out. How do you feel? It’s half an hour of your life that’s gone to nothing in particular. There were eleven other people in the room; let’s estimate a day rate of £400 (a typical contractor rate). That’s £50 an hour. Just the half an hour you were there cost about £300. And it went on when you left. And it happens all the time, all over the place, in every company, in every office.

Ands why does it happen?

Lack of mindfulness. Lack of respect for people’s time. But it’s quite often linked to culture: ‘this is how we do it’.

What a fucking waste.