Don’t Overthink It

It’s the elephant in the meeting room, and I’ve only just spotted it myself.

Image generated by the author using Stable Diffusion

After spending a qualifying amount of time in the Grand Game of Software Engineering you come to the realisation that meetings are more of a marathon than a sprint. Often, quite literally.

For when you see those all too familiar words “quick catchup”, “daily standup”, or “quick 1–1” you realise that the shorter the meeting title the longer it will most likely go on.

Add to that also that the measured correlation between the number of people at the meeting and its duration is always maximal.

You may think at this point that it’s something of a no win situation as any which way you turn a meeting is going to turn into an endurance session of staying as attentive looking as long as possible whilst wearing your best poker face, desperately trying not to think of running water.

At least with an online meeting you can feign “technical problems” once in a while for a quick dash to the loo, a swig of something stimulating, or just to yawn your head off — but in person you have no such luxury.

After years of dealing with the general limelight hugging management tomfoolery and time wasting torpor associated with meetings I recently had something of a revelation as to why some people hold deliberately them, and a…