How many meetings did you have to struggle through today?

I had four scheduled, though I boycotted two of them. What harm was done from that? Absolutely none.

The notion that Covid might have ushered in a freer way of working looks in tatters to me.

One way or another, bosses want control and will plot to achieve it, even if it clearly leads to less productivity.

This from Microsoft makes the point.

It says time spent in meetings has TRIPLED since 2000. The typical worker using its software – that’s nearly all of us – now spends 57% of their time “communicating” in meetings, emails and chats.

Which leaves 43% of the time to do anything actually useful/cry in misery.

The company adds: “Knowledge work is… less about creating new things than it is about talking about those things.”

So Microsoft, a business that exists partly to sell putting on meetings, says there are too many of them.

Welcome though this is, it’s a bit like Mars saying we eat too much chocolate.

I strongly suspect that Microsoft is not a slick place to work. That decisions take a long time to be made, that workers spend ages waiting for someone else to read or do something before anyone can move things along.

The hack trade is minorly guilty of making up meetings for the sake of them.

The flak trade is worse. Most noticeably, it has a post lockdown desire to turn almost any phone call into a Teams meeting.

Even when it’s a phone call that has been taking place once a quarter for years where everyone knows what to expect.

Arranging meetings and turning up to them can make people look busy, I suppose.

It gets in the way of people who are actually busy though. Can we have a collective re-think on this?