Enjoying Meetings

I often find myself not enjoying meetings, for me they are one of the bureaucracy monsters whose diet consists on workers’ efficiency and productivity. Having to stop my focus to jump into a meeting to hear someone talk about some project that is (at best) distantly related to mine does not sound appealing. At the end, assisting to meetings has become a formality that I have in the background while I work on my own stuff. But this strategy keeps me from being fully-productive as the meeting keeps distracting me, and makes me remember little (if any) of the meeting that I have assisted.

Normally, the chain of events would be something like

(Beep beep) Teams notification: You have been invited to assist to some random meeting by some random person about some random topic on Next Thursday

• (Staring at the screen, internal conversation) What is this? Do I have to talk? NO? Then why do I even need to assist? It is not even close to my project, they are not even using similar tools to what I am using, It breaks my Thursday in half, specially Thursday that I wanted to do so many things, and at 11am, this is a terrible time to put a meeting, … (The internal tantrum goes on proportionally to the length of the meeting, the topic, the mood of the day until the final sigh) Okay, whatever

Fast forward to next Thursday

(Beep beep) Teams notification: Your meeting is about to start Join

• (Internal conversation) Oh shit, this fucking meeting, it’s true. Shit, shit, shit, let me finish this very quickly. There is no way I am finishing this before my meeting starts, I guess I will just work through the meeting, at the end it is not something I benefit from listening to

Fast forward 20 mins, some work has been done

• (Stuck in some problem, blah blah in the background) Why won’t they shut up? I don’t care about this, I am trying to focus, and this is messing up with my concentration. The more I try to ignore, the worse that it gets.

Once the meeting finishes I realize that I haven’t learnt anything from the meeting nor have spent my time productively by focusing on another task.

Tired of getting the same bad sensation each time that I had a meeting, at some point (probably as a survival strategy) I had the following internal conversation (in here summarized for the sake of the story):

• If I feel bad for not being productive during the time of the meeting, I should maybe try to change the object of my focus to the content of the meeting itself, this way I can feel productive and at the same time do what is expected of me in the meetings.

• But meetings are so boring, and in most cases I don’t know if I can benefit from listening to any of it.

• Okay, but maybe I should give it a go, put my effort into understanding what is being talked, and try to take it as an exercise to see how well I can understand/ relate the different topics in here presented

Then I would try this, and even if most of the times at first there is a bit of friction, I have gotten to the point where I can now enjoy meetings. Of course there are still some meetings that I find painful, but the number has reduced by a lot, and now in any meeting that is research oriented I find myself taking notes, thinking on how to apply it to my own research or doing quick searches/ prompts to understand some of the details/ keywords that are explained.

Also sometimes I look at meetings as well-deserved breaks where I can step aside from my research and let my brain subconsciously order all the ideas so that later I can make use of this more distant perspective where it is much easier to discern between good and bad approaches than when doing it in the excitement of the moment.

I’m quite happy with having adopted this change, as I now believe that assisting this meetings makes me a better researcher¹, maybe this is what meetings were about from the beginning.