Yet More Ways to Waste a Meeting

From time to time, I hear about new ways to waste time in meetings. Or I realize that a time-waster so popular years ago has gone out of fashion, but is now making a comeback. When I notice enough of these, I post them, hoping to suppress them at least a little bit. This edition is divided into three categories.

Especially for meeting participants

• Skip the meeting even though you know your presence is essential.
• Attend the meeting, but don't prepare for the meeting's agenda.
• Arrive late to the meeting and raise an issue that the others who arrived before you have already dealt with. See "Costs of the Catch-Me-Up Antipattern: I," Point Lookout for August 10, 2016, for more.
• Conceal as best you can your near-total lack of understanding of the basic concepts required for participating in this meeting. Use skills from your early education that enabled you to write book reports for books you never read beyond page 18.
• Employ rhetorical trickery: ad hominem attacks, begging the question, slippery slope, straw man, or any of dozens more rhetorical fallacies.
• Speak for at least 15 seconds before realizing you forgot to unmute yourself.
• Don't execute action items that you accepted at a previous meeting.
• Knowingly spread misinformation.
• Even though you're the Chief Whatever Officer and you're pretty much clueless about the details of whatever the group is doing, "sit in" (with no advance notice) to demonstrate your interest in whatever the group is doing. See "When Power Attends the Meeting," Point Lookout for November 26, 2003, for more.

When working with others on a document

Virtual collaborations are always tricky, but virtual collaborations that author documents are especially difficult. Said differently, they offer a wide variety of opportunities to waste meetings. Here are just a few.

• Propose a material change that has been previously rejected.
• Propose a material change that has been previously accepted using different words.
• Propose a change that has no material effect.
• Propose a change to a section of the document that was deleted two versions ago.
• Propose a change to the font.
• If you aren't very fussy or particular, pretend to be.
• If you're very fussy or particular, act naturally.
• After the meeting, as meeting Scribe, when entering for later review the changes everyone agreed to in this meeting, make some changes of your own without indicating what they are.

Especially for Meeting Chairs

• Spend precious meeting time making announcements that could have been distributed in advance electronically.
• Have an agenda so over-stuffed with unimportant or non-urgent matters that no item that is both urgent and important gets the attention it deserves. See "A Framework for Safe Storming," Point Lookout for January 29, 2025, for more.
• Even though our one and only expert on this agenda item hasn't yet arrived, start anyway because time is short and nobody is so important that they're indispensable.
• Distribute the agenda days in advance, but then change the agenda one hour in advance to accommodate someone who's way overloaded but way powerful.
• Let the meeting run over its published end time so we can finish what we have to do. If some people might be late to their next meeting ask them to convey apologies and say it couldn't be helped.
• Never, ever intervene when the meeting's Resident Bully forces the group to accept an unacceptable mission expansion, budget cut, or schedule squeeze.
• Have the meeting work on something for 20 minutes that some other group instead of ours is now doing, but we don't know that.
• Reject suggestions that the discussion shows signs of confirmation bias, because we've had cognitive bias training so we're no longer vulnerable.
• Permit the videoconference to continue even though 2/3 of the participants are refusing to turn on their cameras. See "Off-Putting and Conversational Narcissism at Work: III," Point Lookout for December 6, 2023, for more.

Last words

Every group, How to waste a meeting: Have an agenda so
over-stuffed with unimportant or non-urgent
matters that no item that is both urgent and
important gets the attention it deserves.in whatever developmental stage it is, operates by executing patterns of behavior. The patterns listed here are dysfunctional, in that they hinder the group in its efforts to execute its mission. The term of art for them is antipatterns. Avoiding antipatterns is a bit easier if we know (a) which antipatterns we're likely to employ in a given class of situations, and (b) which patterns would be more effective. This post is a start on (a). For the b's, have a look at any of the wonderful books about conducting meetings. My favorite would be titled something like, Conducting Meetings in the 21st Century Workplace, if it existed. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything quite like that yet. Might have to write it. If you find it, rbrentSgXnAlNVWlhxNIJner@ChacAtZoEYrrmofzZnjPoCanyon.complease send me a link.  Top    Next Issue

Do you spend your days scurrying from meeting to meeting? Do you ever wonder if all these meetings are really necessary? (They aren't) Or whether there isn't some better way to get this work done? (There is) Read 101 Tips for Effective Meetings to learn how to make meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot more rare. Order Now!

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