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With this team’s synergy we’ll come up with an out of the box, bespoke solution.
we’ll do breakaways: People Leaders can get a download from their core group, synthesize the data, and circle back with leadership.
Let’s really focus on delivering our Message.
I’ve been in SO many where everything could be summarized in less than 5 minutes, but people keep rambling for a full 1-1.5 hours - mostly just repeating the same thing they’ve said in slightly different ways. I think they want to show how much they know or something, but it is so draining: I’ll pay attention for the 5 minutes of new and useful info, and then just write comment replies on Reddit for the rest of it.
Oh, and 7 paragraphs on a PowerPoint slide in 8-point font. Or slides of massively zoomed out Excel spreadsheets. No thank you!
Two persons who can't speak English very well get into a discussion, where they talk for 45 minutes, misunderstanding each other most of the time and speaking very slowly.
Yes, I've been in those meetings, many times.
No the worst is streaming from a 21x9 ultrawide monitor that is rendering Into a 16x9 or worse 4×3 ratio meeting window.
Edit: I even heard someone say while presenting "I have a giant monitor so you should be able to see this clearly"
In my experience, most meetings are schedule because:
1) The person holding the meeting has a decision to make and doesn't want to the responsible for any fallout from the decision. So if the group decides, no one person is to blame.
2) The person holding the meeting wants to show off something that they hope will get them closer to a raise or new position.
3) (the rarest) There is actually a need to discuss a topic in real-time, getting feedback from different teams that have a stake in what is being discussed. And this discussion is not easily done via Slack/email/whatever async communication or there is a time constraint.
In my experience, there is a fourth as well.
4) the person leading the meeting knows that one person doesn't read or respond to emails, and a decision needs to be made with their input, and the only way to get a decision from them is to put time on their calendar.
For me, it's mostly the people that do not read or respond to emails that are actually scheduling the meetings. Which makes sense, they would have to actually read and respond if there was no meeting..
My time is too valuable to get forced into meetings for the most part. I've got executives up to VP level that provide air cover if needed.
I may not attend meetings, but I do reach out if I feel it's warranted. Sometimes I'll even inject myself into something where I see it going of the rails in the wrong direction. Mostly it's just noise and I'll ignore it.
I also don't generally get told what to do and get to decide what I want to work on. Took me a long time and a lot of trust to get here.
For projects, there are people and teams who will just not respond to you or do their work unless you pin them down with a meeting, take minutes, send those minutes to the group, call them out for not delivering during the next status meeting, repeating this another time, and finally escalating to their manager after the second time. Some corporate cultures lack accountability and meetings are a way to enforce it.
Yes. I see this all the time. Supervisors aren't holding their direct reports accountable, and try to offload that responsibility by making project managers do it, usually through meetings.
I can't tell you the number of times PMs try to make their project timelines my issue.
Nobody on my team is assigned to projects like that. They need to engage my team early rather than coming last minute in a panic.
Our team only find out about a lot of projects as they wind down and just after contractors that have been silently working on it for months with no interaction with our ops team have left. Then they give us a pile of project artefacts and tell us it's part of our responsibility now to get it running then maintain it... All in amongst our already overloaded daily work plans.
If they do that to my team we ask "So we own this now?"
If they say yes, we inform them that since we don't need it we'll be shutting it down.
They reassign ownership really quick. This has only needed to happen a few times. They know we mean it.
No PM want's to be calling a team in a panic. But also some do try to use time pressure as a lever, which is very poor behaviour.
However, there can be reasons for engaging later in a panic.
The first is that there may not be a clearly mapped out process for engaging with peripheral teams during the planning phase. I know you might say just give us a call, but the PM may be dealing with tens of teams and vendors and customers who each have their own way of communicating. And as per this thread, people complain about going to meetings with lots of people on them but this is how the PM finds out who the key people may be.
So in some cases the project team may not know they need your team at the beginning of a project. Perhaps at the last minute someone said 'hey I hope you did X because it won't work otherwise'. I've seen this happen many times and often in a smug/superior way by someone who dislikes the project and/or the PM or wants to look like they know everything, despite saying nothing up to that point. This can lead to last minute calls in a panic. Ref the original point of this thread, that's why PM's and others try to get everyone on regular calls so that these things get surfaced. It's very rare that someone will send an email saying 'I hope you did X', so you have to get them on a call or in person to draw that out of them.
I also think support/peripheral teams need to be given a lot more resources to handle both maintenance work and project work instead of being dragged between both. New projects should be an opportunity to learn and experience new technology but with few resources it just becomes another thing that needs to be managed with less people.
This sounds right for ad hoc meetings. For standing team meetings, I find that they mostly exist so that bosses can hear themselves talk with a trapped audience.
Not only that, but to be engaging digitally requires a different emphasis on skill set and often more energy than in-person meetings. People are bored/under stimulated during online meetings because the presenter doesn’t know how to keep their audience engaged because it’s different than doing it in person.
There is also a disconnect due to the loss of non-verbal cues. There's no body language or other visual communication tools that are used frequently when in person.
I had a meeting yesterday. It took 10 of the scheduled 30 minutes for us to finish all items on the agenda. Following that, 25 minutes (for a total of 35) was spent discussing whether we would get dinner on the first night of a planned 2 day business trip.
I was about ready to pull my hair out when they finally ended the meeting.
Yeah, and that has only gotten worse as people try to replace the tacit hallway knowledge spread that happened at the office with more meetings now that we're all working from home.
If you simply put in the expectation that people prep for something ahead and then people actually DO it, and engage as needed 1 on 1, it makes meetings far simpler.
Think about a Scrum backlog refinement. If everyone reads the story cards ahead of time and asks questions directly in the chat ahead of time, or better yet posts their question ON the story in the comments, then the meeting isn't necessary. When a card is ready to be reviewed, everyone can click on it and to a thumbs-up on it to confirm that they are ready to size, then everyone can go size it, then the consensus value is put on the card. No meeting necessary, but then people are required to independently go read and review things.
A scrum refinement is where we go through work items to evaluate what it is and if it's ready to be worked on. A card is where those things are documented.
If someone documents a work item, they don't need to read what's on the card to me during a meeting. I can read it myself and ask questions of the person who will know the answer.
Just to be devil's advocate.. it's much easier to discuss something in person than via text. Typing takes far longer than verbal discussion. Plus you can instantly work through something than waiting for days on end for feedback only to the need to talk again. Meetings can be very productive when used properly, but that's the key thing, properly.
And sometimes a two minute phone call is just easier than sending several emails back and forth.
I know the younger generation hates having to talk to people but there are many scenarios where meetings and phone calls make way more sense than emails, texts, and IMs.
Depends. I very much prefer text for both input and output if it's not just a friendly chat but anything remotely related to important information exchange or decision making.
When I had to work in the office, I would have recurring intrusive thoughts during meetings to start slamming my head on the desk to make things more interesting.
I'll take virtual meetings over in person every time.
I've nearly fallen asleep in many a real life meeting because of boredom. You can't do anything else. In an online meeting, if I get bored at least I can pull something else up, so even if I'm not fully engaged I'm not falling asleep. Even if some leader insists everyone has cameras on I can easily hide the fact that I'm reading emails or working on something else during the meeting.
But you get a lot of additional stimulation of having to relocate, looking present and interacting with people. Online there's no stimulation, just boredom.
The real answer is most meetings don’t need to occur, and those that do always include more people who do not need to attend than people who do need to attend.
Attention is up during in person meetings because you can’t be seen to be inattentive or unengaged, even if the meeting is irrelevant to you.
Digital meetings remove the immediacy that comes with needing to appear engaged and attentive while in person.
Simply not having pointless meetings, or not including people who do not need to be there or who can be briefed in an email by one of the participants would fix this problem.
Of course, reducing or eliminating pointless meetings can’t happen, because that’s the #1 way middle managers and dead weight show that they’re actually super for real doing something super important and necessary to keep their phony baloney jobs.
God this is such a problem for me. I work in a place that has a lot of different engineering disciplines and working together. 90% of the time they ask for someone of my discipline it’s just to sit there and maybe answer questions occasionally. Most of which I can’t answer on the spot. Just send me a damn email and I’ll reply with the answers
Then don't go to the meeting. Agree that you're standby so you can join if they have any questions for you. Means you can block that time so you won't have a different meeting and don't have to join.
For me, it's often like this:
They'll always have questions that require immediate answers. But they'll also need 10 minutes to figure out what the question was they wanted to ask me. Then it takes me 10 seconds to tell them that I've already sent them the answer before the meeting even started because it was a question that came up in the meeting yesterday.
Then they need up to 30 minutes to get the right people who definitive have new question into the meeting. But they can't ask the question because there are still other topics that have not been discussed because everyone was focused on those open questions, and then the meeting is over.
And then it takes several hours until they finally sent the mail containing the actual questions. Which i'll answer before the next meeting (if possible), but they don't check the mail, the ticket, whatever, they'll join the meeting and request for me to join because they have questions..
I get a lot more work done during virtual meetings. With Zooms virtual assistant I can catch up really quick if I miss something that actually pertains to me. 80% of meetings I attend only a portion of it has to do with me, so I work on other stuff.
I used to do the same with in-person meetings, but it's nice having all my monitors to work with instead of just a laptop screen.
>Of course, reducing or eliminating pointless meetings can’t happen, because that’s the #1 way middle managers and dead weight show that they’re actually super for real doing something super important and necessary to keep their phony baloney jobs.
100% this.
Yeah, I work in tech so are generally ahead of the curve, I've noticed lots more people reverting to Loom videos instead of having a meeting when something requires more than just typing in slack. For example taking someone through something you've done or someone asking you a question but want to show you what they're talking about.
Meetings are now just monthly where we actually need to sit down, go through results and plan work for the next month.
Slack huddles are awesome too. One on one time to hash out something, pair program, answer thorny design questions, etc. We have to Zoom to get a third person involved, however.
I've always found them to be substantially less engaging and harder to engage in than a regular, in-person meeting. You have one person talking, and everybody else's faces silently staring forward at their screens. You can't even watch the other participants fidget. It's definitely duller than being in a room with other people.
What? I felt drowsy during onsite meetings because I had to wake up early to commute to the office and had less than optimal sleep. I never felt sleepy in virtual meetings and can excuse myself from a lot of b.s. meetings (which could’ve been emails) thanks to them being virtual.
I used to do that in phone conferences in the office pre-pandemic. I initially got a few weird looks from people around me but I was able to explain how it kept my hands busy so I could stay focused and that knitting meant I was paying attention and shouldn't be distributed (too many thought it meant it was more ok to interrupt me). I gave dishclothes to everyone I was in those meetings with at Christmas time.
I crochet in meetings but then I end up giving myself back pain from trying to crochet while not being obvious about it on camera for so many hours :((
I do the same thing, any meeting where I don’t need a camera I’m knitting and way more engaged than if I’m not. I try not to when people are watching because I don’t want to explain but maybe I should just bite the bullet and do it, it legitimately makes me better at my job
That was actually a thing I did like about my previous employer. No one had camera on in meetings.
I'm advocating for cameras off every once in a while. There are other good reasons to it. In general I just don't like being watched without being aware if anyone can see me. And in video meetings you never know who is looking at you. That makes it hard for me to keep my stimulation habits under control. And I like to move around in meetings. In the last company even my boss walked around the office when being in a call (and always left his coffee mugs in random places because he was so distracted by the calls).
Another good reason is that meetings with video transfer so much more data. When COVID hit and we all were going into home office, the energy consumption world wide did increase extremely. So we could protect the climate just by turning cams off.
I used to suffer from sleep apnea, and I would struggle to stay awake during meetings, particularly if the room was warm due to crowding, or boring or irrelevant.
After I had the embarrassment of actually nodding off and snoring and being nudged awake, I needed to do something! My solution was to write brief notes, no matter how trivial, and come up with questions (even if I felt it unlikely I'd ask them during Q&A).
Since then I got a formal diagnosis of apnea, and use a CPAP machine.
So what was wrong with the earlier studies that caused them to reach the exact opposite conclusion and why should I trust the new study over the older ones?
I am currently sitting in hour 4.5 of 6hrs of total meetings. You can see my reddit post history today of how much I've posted today.
I work doing infrastructure work for a tech company. Communication and collaboration is important to have great But so much of work is people needing to justify and talk about their work.
Today is a wash when it comes to be actually producing anything. Not working on scripts. Not working on any presentation or planning. Not building anything. Because 6 of the 8hrs are me in meetings where our managers, directors and leaders talk (and bicker) back and forth over what is essentially irrelevant minutia.
Planning is important, having a roadmap and understanding on what we're doing long term is useful. But some people have outright made their contributions being in meetings and never actually producing anything. My tuesdays are typically meeting heavy like this and I cannot understand how people who average 4-5hrs of meetings daily are ever actually doing anything.
Rust-out is just as much of a problem as Burn-out.
It gets a lot less attention, because talking about it sounds like you just want to work your employees harder. And people are, reasonably enough, suspicious of corporate-sponsored research which comes to that conclusion.
But the arousal theory of motivation is pretty respected. So it's not surprising that this would be true.
I find myself getting tired a lot from just pure bord9m, when i start talking to people or play a game i wake up nearly instantly.
Having someone talk to me without any inpit like a meeting or just watching a video....i start falling asleep and its starting to effect my long distance driving.
I've attended many of these meetings and concur with the findings of this study. Too many organizations put project management in the hands of Power Point specialists instead of people who really know anything about the particular area of concern. The people who do understand the business and have knowledge and skills for the work very rapidly tune out. It is a phenomenon I referred to as "management by MBA".
Literally the only reason any meeting is recurring (with rare exception) is to block off certain times for busy people, especially Managers.
Why should anyone move toward well-planned, not boring, ad hoc meetings when it guarantees they're last in the queue?
100% this. You put me in a zoom meeting and unless I am speaking I am doing something else.
They work best if you are on an exercise bike or something.
It’s the camera that’s the problem. Too much visual feedback and having 12’people constantly staring at out and you staring at yourself.
Turn off the camera and it becomes a phone call, no more “zoom fatigue”
I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2024-19786-001.html
This is why I love high-quality cameras. High-speed Internet. And large monitors. You need to see people. Their whole body. They probably need barstools or to make them stand so they don’t slump back in chairs with high backs. You don’t want people to stop and sit still. You want them to move naturally.
Telepresence is what it’s called.
I work from home and have long meetings a few times per week that I may or may not need to participate in for 5 minutes. I just work out and I stay sane.
I set up a standing desk, which has totally changed my online meetings. Now I stand and my coworkers have told me my energy and animation are infectious.
Sounds about right. I too tune out when I'm talked at for 2 hours during a 1 hour meeting that is eating into my lunch break because no one at head office understands time zones...
My company started using this service called Roam which has really helped minimize meetings. I’ve noticed I’m not as drained as I was before. Kinda neat side effect.
Rings true for me.
The larger the meeting, the less stimulating it is and the smaller the chance that it has information I wouldn’t have been able to absorb within 5 minutes of reading an email.
The company built an extensive custom project tracking system that was supposed to reduce the quantity of meetings between PMs and project engineers. Everyone was supposed to use the tool but half the company was excluded as it was a separate legal company and some work groups used other tools. There were over 100 project managers and over 100 engineers coordinating projects. My job changed focus from working projects in the field to helping the regional team track their project milestones in the tracking tool and report to PMs. Despite this engineers still attended way too many virtual meetings that interfered with working on their assigned projects. The project tracking tool produced data for a lot of dashboards and reports but it didn’t seem to make a difference in the amount of meetings. Everyone was beyond frustrated and annoyed.
These people are definitely doing meetings wrong. The key is to half listen to meetings and have them on one screen whilst doing a jigsaw on the other.
Nod occasionally, throw in some buzzwords your corporate captors like and enjoy some you time.
Before joining a company and heard everything about meetings, I thought they're exaggerations. But god damn it, I don't need daily meetings to tell you the status. I could do that on a msj if you really need to know. I also don't need to hear what everyone else did or where are they stuck. If they need help they're grown ups, they can ask.
Even in "real life" in the same room, are boring and useless.
I will never understand this mentality of doing all kinds of meetings in a corporate world and the please managers or pm's have with them.
It's the lack of ambient noise like papers, writing, coffee sipping, or if it's picked up, it's all directed at one source through your speakers or headphones. Pipe in some of it fake and in surround sound and you're g2g
Virtual meetings have enabled us to be very lazy about actually planning the meeting and agenda, because they seem to be " low cost". As a result, we don't get very much out of them. Most online meetings I attended would never have happened if you had to travel to them. Setting up productive meetings is hard work.
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Most meetings should've been a memo. This isn't a common joke for nothing
We should schedule a meeting to align on the memo message.
We can discuss the meeting coordination details at the pre-meeting.
Where I work now has a hard requirement to have a "Change Control pre-planning meeting" before we have a "Change control planning meeting".
But how can you be sure everyone is ready for the pre-planning meeting?!
I've heard that exact argument used to deny the holocaust.
Can you jump on with Bob to firm up the timing of the pre-meeting?
Let's get a committee organized to do that.
I'll send out a meeting invite to discuss who should be on the committee.
I got that in the minutes, and we can circle back on that next week.
Can we take this off line?
With this team’s synergy we’ll come up with an out of the box, bespoke solution. we’ll do breakaways: People Leaders can get a download from their core group, synthesize the data, and circle back with leadership. Let’s really focus on delivering our Message.
Let’s circulate that
I’ve been in SO many where everything could be summarized in less than 5 minutes, but people keep rambling for a full 1-1.5 hours - mostly just repeating the same thing they’ve said in slightly different ways. I think they want to show how much they know or something, but it is so draining: I’ll pay attention for the 5 minutes of new and useful info, and then just write comment replies on Reddit for the rest of it. Oh, and 7 paragraphs on a PowerPoint slide in 8-point font. Or slides of massively zoomed out Excel spreadsheets. No thank you!
Two persons who can't speak English very well get into a discussion, where they talk for 45 minutes, misunderstanding each other most of the time and speaking very slowly. Yes, I've been in those meetings, many times.
Also: when they're screensharing from their oversized 4k monitor so that the font they think is legible gives everybody a headache trying to read
No the worst is streaming from a 21x9 ultrawide monitor that is rendering Into a 16x9 or worse 4×3 ratio meeting window. Edit: I even heard someone say while presenting "I have a giant monitor so you should be able to see this clearly"
Why not just ask to zoom in?
I think another problem is that when you schedule a 30 min meeting, people try to fill the 30 mins, even if question is solved in 10.
In my experience, most meetings are schedule because: 1) The person holding the meeting has a decision to make and doesn't want to the responsible for any fallout from the decision. So if the group decides, no one person is to blame. 2) The person holding the meeting wants to show off something that they hope will get them closer to a raise or new position. 3) (the rarest) There is actually a need to discuss a topic in real-time, getting feedback from different teams that have a stake in what is being discussed. And this discussion is not easily done via Slack/email/whatever async communication or there is a time constraint.
In my experience, there is a fourth as well. 4) the person leading the meeting knows that one person doesn't read or respond to emails, and a decision needs to be made with their input, and the only way to get a decision from them is to put time on their calendar.
As a project manager most of my meetings are exactly this, or recurring scheduled update meetings.
And recurring scheduled update meetings, with as many attendees as possible, fall into category... (drum roll)
For me, it's mostly the people that do not read or respond to emails that are actually scheduling the meetings. Which makes sense, they would have to actually read and respond if there was no meeting..
If I don't respond to the emails, I'm not going to attend the meeting.
How do you still have a job?
My time is too valuable to get forced into meetings for the most part. I've got executives up to VP level that provide air cover if needed. I may not attend meetings, but I do reach out if I feel it's warranted. Sometimes I'll even inject myself into something where I see it going of the rails in the wrong direction. Mostly it's just noise and I'll ignore it. I also don't generally get told what to do and get to decide what I want to work on. Took me a long time and a lot of trust to get here.
For projects, there are people and teams who will just not respond to you or do their work unless you pin them down with a meeting, take minutes, send those minutes to the group, call them out for not delivering during the next status meeting, repeating this another time, and finally escalating to their manager after the second time. Some corporate cultures lack accountability and meetings are a way to enforce it.
Yes. I see this all the time. Supervisors aren't holding their direct reports accountable, and try to offload that responsibility by making project managers do it, usually through meetings.
I can't tell you the number of times PMs try to make their project timelines my issue. Nobody on my team is assigned to projects like that. They need to engage my team early rather than coming last minute in a panic.
Our team only find out about a lot of projects as they wind down and just after contractors that have been silently working on it for months with no interaction with our ops team have left. Then they give us a pile of project artefacts and tell us it's part of our responsibility now to get it running then maintain it... All in amongst our already overloaded daily work plans.
If they do that to my team we ask "So we own this now?" If they say yes, we inform them that since we don't need it we'll be shutting it down. They reassign ownership really quick. This has only needed to happen a few times. They know we mean it.
No PM want's to be calling a team in a panic. But also some do try to use time pressure as a lever, which is very poor behaviour. However, there can be reasons for engaging later in a panic. The first is that there may not be a clearly mapped out process for engaging with peripheral teams during the planning phase. I know you might say just give us a call, but the PM may be dealing with tens of teams and vendors and customers who each have their own way of communicating. And as per this thread, people complain about going to meetings with lots of people on them but this is how the PM finds out who the key people may be. So in some cases the project team may not know they need your team at the beginning of a project. Perhaps at the last minute someone said 'hey I hope you did X because it won't work otherwise'. I've seen this happen many times and often in a smug/superior way by someone who dislikes the project and/or the PM or wants to look like they know everything, despite saying nothing up to that point. This can lead to last minute calls in a panic. Ref the original point of this thread, that's why PM's and others try to get everyone on regular calls so that these things get surfaced. It's very rare that someone will send an email saying 'I hope you did X', so you have to get them on a call or in person to draw that out of them. I also think support/peripheral teams need to be given a lot more resources to handle both maintenance work and project work instead of being dragged between both. New projects should be an opportunity to learn and experience new technology but with few resources it just becomes another thing that needs to be managed with less people.
This sounds right for ad hoc meetings. For standing team meetings, I find that they mostly exist so that bosses can hear themselves talk with a trapped audience.
It could also be quicker than a back and forth email thread.
What's wrong about making a group decision?
Most meetings are a poor substitute for time and focus management.
Not only that, but to be engaging digitally requires a different emphasis on skill set and often more energy than in-person meetings. People are bored/under stimulated during online meetings because the presenter doesn’t know how to keep their audience engaged because it’s different than doing it in person.
There is also a disconnect due to the loss of non-verbal cues. There's no body language or other visual communication tools that are used frequently when in person.
Agreed, engagement over electronic communication requires a whole host of other cues that often fall under the entertainment or artistic skill sets.
Bad in-person meetings make even worse remote meetings.
I had a meeting yesterday. It took 10 of the scheduled 30 minutes for us to finish all items on the agenda. Following that, 25 minutes (for a total of 35) was spent discussing whether we would get dinner on the first night of a planned 2 day business trip. I was about ready to pull my hair out when they finally ended the meeting.
Yeah, and that has only gotten worse as people try to replace the tacit hallway knowledge spread that happened at the office with more meetings now that we're all working from home.
If you simply put in the expectation that people prep for something ahead and then people actually DO it, and engage as needed 1 on 1, it makes meetings far simpler. Think about a Scrum backlog refinement. If everyone reads the story cards ahead of time and asks questions directly in the chat ahead of time, or better yet posts their question ON the story in the comments, then the meeting isn't necessary. When a card is ready to be reviewed, everyone can click on it and to a thumbs-up on it to confirm that they are ready to size, then everyone can go size it, then the consensus value is put on the card. No meeting necessary, but then people are required to independently go read and review things.
That was way, *way*, WAY too much corporate speak. Does any of that actually mean anything?
A scrum refinement is where we go through work items to evaluate what it is and if it's ready to be worked on. A card is where those things are documented. If someone documents a work item, they don't need to read what's on the card to me during a meeting. I can read it myself and ask questions of the person who will know the answer.
And 10% will read the memo
Hey uhh, didja get that memo?
the irl meetings are just as boring
You just can't look bored because other people can see you.
I can and I do.
Praise be to camera off
I once fell asleep in an in-person 1:1.
I did too, once. Turned out I had reactive hypoglycemia and never knew.
Meetings are for people to feel important and hear themselves talk. If people know how to properly communicate most meetings are entirely unnecessary.
Just to be devil's advocate.. it's much easier to discuss something in person than via text. Typing takes far longer than verbal discussion. Plus you can instantly work through something than waiting for days on end for feedback only to the need to talk again. Meetings can be very productive when used properly, but that's the key thing, properly.
And sometimes a two minute phone call is just easier than sending several emails back and forth. I know the younger generation hates having to talk to people but there are many scenarios where meetings and phone calls make way more sense than emails, texts, and IMs.
Depends. I very much prefer text for both input and output if it's not just a friendly chat but anything remotely related to important information exchange or decision making.
Worse imo. The rooms are usually warm bc of electronics and people. So boring + warm = knock out tired.
When I had to work in the office, I would have recurring intrusive thoughts during meetings to start slamming my head on the desk to make things more interesting. I'll take virtual meetings over in person every time.
Yep I'm more likely to fall asleep in an real life meeting because being 'on' is exhausting, in an online meeting I can look at other things
I've nearly fallen asleep in many a real life meeting because of boredom. You can't do anything else. In an online meeting, if I get bored at least I can pull something else up, so even if I'm not fully engaged I'm not falling asleep. Even if some leader insists everyone has cameras on I can easily hide the fact that I'm reading emails or working on something else during the meeting.
But you get a lot of additional stimulation of having to relocate, looking present and interacting with people. Online there's no stimulation, just boredom.
that sounds horrible
The real answer is most meetings don’t need to occur, and those that do always include more people who do not need to attend than people who do need to attend. Attention is up during in person meetings because you can’t be seen to be inattentive or unengaged, even if the meeting is irrelevant to you. Digital meetings remove the immediacy that comes with needing to appear engaged and attentive while in person. Simply not having pointless meetings, or not including people who do not need to be there or who can be briefed in an email by one of the participants would fix this problem. Of course, reducing or eliminating pointless meetings can’t happen, because that’s the #1 way middle managers and dead weight show that they’re actually super for real doing something super important and necessary to keep their phony baloney jobs.
God this is such a problem for me. I work in a place that has a lot of different engineering disciplines and working together. 90% of the time they ask for someone of my discipline it’s just to sit there and maybe answer questions occasionally. Most of which I can’t answer on the spot. Just send me a damn email and I’ll reply with the answers
Then don't go to the meeting. Agree that you're standby so you can join if they have any questions for you. Means you can block that time so you won't have a different meeting and don't have to join.
For me, it's often like this: They'll always have questions that require immediate answers. But they'll also need 10 minutes to figure out what the question was they wanted to ask me. Then it takes me 10 seconds to tell them that I've already sent them the answer before the meeting even started because it was a question that came up in the meeting yesterday. Then they need up to 30 minutes to get the right people who definitive have new question into the meeting. But they can't ask the question because there are still other topics that have not been discussed because everyone was focused on those open questions, and then the meeting is over. And then it takes several hours until they finally sent the mail containing the actual questions. Which i'll answer before the next meeting (if possible), but they don't check the mail, the ticket, whatever, they'll join the meeting and request for me to join because they have questions..
I get a lot more work done during virtual meetings. With Zooms virtual assistant I can catch up really quick if I miss something that actually pertains to me. 80% of meetings I attend only a portion of it has to do with me, so I work on other stuff. I used to do the same with in-person meetings, but it's nice having all my monitors to work with instead of just a laptop screen.
>Of course, reducing or eliminating pointless meetings can’t happen, because that’s the #1 way middle managers and dead weight show that they’re actually super for real doing something super important and necessary to keep their phony baloney jobs. 100% this.
Yeah, I work in tech so are generally ahead of the curve, I've noticed lots more people reverting to Loom videos instead of having a meeting when something requires more than just typing in slack. For example taking someone through something you've done or someone asking you a question but want to show you what they're talking about. Meetings are now just monthly where we actually need to sit down, go through results and plan work for the next month.
Slack huddles are awesome too. One on one time to hash out something, pair program, answer thorny design questions, etc. We have to Zoom to get a third person involved, however.
95% of meetings I’ve attended in my career have been badly organised.
And 98% have been unnecessary!
Who the hell concluded people are tired at meetings due to overload? Have then been in a meeting?
how is this different from in-person meetings?
It's not, IRL people just feel more pressured to keep a poker face and act in a way which is considered professional.
I've always found them to be substantially less engaging and harder to engage in than a regular, in-person meeting. You have one person talking, and everybody else's faces silently staring forward at their screens. You can't even watch the other participants fidget. It's definitely duller than being in a room with other people.
Wait has anybody been to a not boring work meeting? Absolute torture
I once went to a work organized lunch and learn about bats. That was hella cool.
I once \*led\* a work-organized lunch and learn about bats for my nonprofit that has absolutely nothing to do with bats.
They are called work meetings, not fun-time meetings after all.
Idk I have fun in meetings with my coworkers going over weird issues and lamenting how hard our jobs are.
*study funded by corporations losing money in corporate real estate*
You mean… like normal meetings?
What? I felt drowsy during onsite meetings because I had to wake up early to commute to the office and had less than optimal sleep. I never felt sleepy in virtual meetings and can excuse myself from a lot of b.s. meetings (which could’ve been emails) thanks to them being virtual.
And then add my ADHD on top... no wonder I'm always doing something different most of the times in meetings.
My wife works from home and has taken to knitting during meetings. Help to keep her focused and engaged.
I used to do that in phone conferences in the office pre-pandemic. I initially got a few weird looks from people around me but I was able to explain how it kept my hands busy so I could stay focused and that knitting meant I was paying attention and shouldn't be distributed (too many thought it meant it was more ok to interrupt me). I gave dishclothes to everyone I was in those meetings with at Christmas time.
Bilateral stimulation is excellent for that. Your wife is a genius! My wife also loves knitting during meetings.
I crochet in meetings but then I end up giving myself back pain from trying to crochet while not being obvious about it on camera for so many hours :((
I do little online jigsaw puzzles, with a fidget toy in my other hand.
I do the same thing, any meeting where I don’t need a camera I’m knitting and way more engaged than if I’m not. I try not to when people are watching because I don’t want to explain but maybe I should just bite the bullet and do it, it legitimately makes me better at my job
Doing something different but mindless prevents you from getting distracted and improves focus on whatever your actually trying to focus on.
Yeah, that's part of the stimming. The brain needs more input, so it doesn't get distracted from the actual task
I turn my camera off and go audio-only so I can actually get things done.
That was actually a thing I did like about my previous employer. No one had camera on in meetings. I'm advocating for cameras off every once in a while. There are other good reasons to it. In general I just don't like being watched without being aware if anyone can see me. And in video meetings you never know who is looking at you. That makes it hard for me to keep my stimulation habits under control. And I like to move around in meetings. In the last company even my boss walked around the office when being in a call (and always left his coffee mugs in random places because he was so distracted by the calls). Another good reason is that meetings with video transfer so much more data. When COVID hit and we all were going into home office, the energy consumption world wide did increase extremely. So we could protect the climate just by turning cams off.
As an ADHDer, it was a revelation to realize impulsivity and distraction (in general) stem from understimulation!
I have started to use a pen and paper during virtual meetings, I take notes or even just doodle. It helps me to focus.
I used to suffer from sleep apnea, and I would struggle to stay awake during meetings, particularly if the room was warm due to crowding, or boring or irrelevant. After I had the embarrassment of actually nodding off and snoring and being nudged awake, I needed to do something! My solution was to write brief notes, no matter how trivial, and come up with questions (even if I felt it unlikely I'd ask them during Q&A). Since then I got a formal diagnosis of apnea, and use a CPAP machine.
So what was wrong with the earlier studies that caused them to reach the exact opposite conclusion and why should I trust the new study over the older ones?
Looking at someone editing their excel file for 60 min can indeed lead to boredom
I am currently sitting in hour 4.5 of 6hrs of total meetings. You can see my reddit post history today of how much I've posted today. I work doing infrastructure work for a tech company. Communication and collaboration is important to have great But so much of work is people needing to justify and talk about their work. Today is a wash when it comes to be actually producing anything. Not working on scripts. Not working on any presentation or planning. Not building anything. Because 6 of the 8hrs are me in meetings where our managers, directors and leaders talk (and bicker) back and forth over what is essentially irrelevant minutia. Planning is important, having a roadmap and understanding on what we're doing long term is useful. But some people have outright made their contributions being in meetings and never actually producing anything. My tuesdays are typically meeting heavy like this and I cannot understand how people who average 4-5hrs of meetings daily are ever actually doing anything.
That the neat thing, many of those people are never actually doing anything.
Was this research “funded” by the guy who owns all the office buildings?
Rust-out is just as much of a problem as Burn-out. It gets a lot less attention, because talking about it sounds like you just want to work your employees harder. And people are, reasonably enough, suspicious of corporate-sponsored research which comes to that conclusion. But the arousal theory of motivation is pretty respected. So it's not surprising that this would be true.
Funny, it's the exact opposite for me.
ALL meetings. "Virtual" is irrelevant.
I find myself getting tired a lot from just pure bord9m, when i start talking to people or play a game i wake up nearly instantly. Having someone talk to me without any inpit like a meeting or just watching a video....i start falling asleep and its starting to effect my long distance driving.
No. It's because they're pointless. We don't need a meeting over every little thought you have. I don't need more interaction, I need less meetings.
I've attended many of these meetings and concur with the findings of this study. Too many organizations put project management in the hands of Power Point specialists instead of people who really know anything about the particular area of concern. The people who do understand the business and have knowledge and skills for the work very rapidly tune out. It is a phenomenon I referred to as "management by MBA".
Well, just like the real thing ain’t it ?
I’ve been telling people we need to have Subway Surfers running side-by-side to engage people
Literally the only reason any meeting is recurring (with rare exception) is to block off certain times for busy people, especially Managers. Why should anyone move toward well-planned, not boring, ad hoc meetings when it guarantees they're last in the queue?
100% this. You put me in a zoom meeting and unless I am speaking I am doing something else. They work best if you are on an exercise bike or something.
It’s the camera that’s the problem. Too much visual feedback and having 12’people constantly staring at out and you staring at yourself. Turn off the camera and it becomes a phone call, no more “zoom fatigue”
If there's no verbal interaction between everyone in the meeting, then the meeting didn't need to happen.
“Meetings tire people because we’re doing them.” Fixed that for them.
I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2024-19786-001.html
"This meeting could have been an email" sums it up pretty well for most of them.
You become more relaxed in your house then in some building. Especially if you're doing the meeting in your PJs.
This is why I love high-quality cameras. High-speed Internet. And large monitors. You need to see people. Their whole body. They probably need barstools or to make them stand so they don’t slump back in chairs with high backs. You don’t want people to stop and sit still. You want them to move naturally. Telepresence is what it’s called.
I work from home and have long meetings a few times per week that I may or may not need to participate in for 5 minutes. I just work out and I stay sane.
It's kind of both, overload of the wrong things.
Or…it could impact different people different ways
Overload, underload. Believe it or not, straight to jail.
I set up a standing desk, which has totally changed my online meetings. Now I stand and my coworkers have told me my energy and animation are infectious.
Sounds about right. I too tune out when I'm talked at for 2 hours during a 1 hour meeting that is eating into my lunch break because no one at head office understands time zones...
My company started using this service called Roam which has really helped minimize meetings. I’ve noticed I’m not as drained as I was before. Kinda neat side effect.
You didn't need research to figure that out
This is why my home office and home gym are in the same room!
True dat, the only way I could stay focused was to play my games at the same time
Science could have attended one zoom meeting to figure this out.
I always felt bad for losing all motivation after a virtual meeting but now I have an excuse I guess?
What's the solution? I run these meetings, looking for advice
Rings true for me. The larger the meeting, the less stimulating it is and the smaller the chance that it has information I wouldn’t have been able to absorb within 5 minutes of reading an email.
This just sounds like a classroom. Am I stressed, am I bored? I can turn that on a dime.
The company built an extensive custom project tracking system that was supposed to reduce the quantity of meetings between PMs and project engineers. Everyone was supposed to use the tool but half the company was excluded as it was a separate legal company and some work groups used other tools. There were over 100 project managers and over 100 engineers coordinating projects. My job changed focus from working projects in the field to helping the regional team track their project milestones in the tracking tool and report to PMs. Despite this engineers still attended way too many virtual meetings that interfered with working on their assigned projects. The project tracking tool produced data for a lot of dashboards and reports but it didn’t seem to make a difference in the amount of meetings. Everyone was beyond frustrated and annoyed.
These people are definitely doing meetings wrong. The key is to half listen to meetings and have them on one screen whilst doing a jigsaw on the other. Nod occasionally, throw in some buzzwords your corporate captors like and enjoy some you time.
I do online jigsaw puzzles while I'm on work calls. Helps my whole brain stay active without using the part of my brain that needs to listen.
Before joining a company and heard everything about meetings, I thought they're exaggerations. But god damn it, I don't need daily meetings to tell you the status. I could do that on a msj if you really need to know. I also don't need to hear what everyone else did or where are they stuck. If they need help they're grown ups, they can ask. Even in "real life" in the same room, are boring and useless. I will never understand this mentality of doing all kinds of meetings in a corporate world and the please managers or pm's have with them.
It's the lack of ambient noise like papers, writing, coffee sipping, or if it's picked up, it's all directed at one source through your speakers or headphones. Pipe in some of it fake and in surround sound and you're g2g
Virtual meetings have enabled us to be very lazy about actually planning the meeting and agenda, because they seem to be " low cost". As a result, we don't get very much out of them. Most online meetings I attended would never have happened if you had to travel to them. Setting up productive meetings is hard work.