meetings at work

Okay, this is just a rant, because I need to vent. I am getting really irritated with people in my office who schedule meetings then are really late for them or cancel them at the very last second. Sometimes the only reason I fight my symptoms to come into the office is because there is some meeting I have to be at. Then I get to the office and find out the meeting is cancelled, so I didn't need to waste all that energy trying to be on time. Or I skip lunch because of a meeting, that is then cancelled.

Or they move meetings around day of after I've made plans for the gaps in between meetings.

There is just no respect for other people's time. It also decreases everyone's productivity because we are always rescheduling and have to prepare or re-prepare for a meeting. The loss in productivity is what bothers me most. More than anyone else in the office, my work is deadline driven. So I have to get certain things done and I plan my task schedule around when meetings are so that I can meet deadlines. When meetings are constantly changing or starting 15-20 minutes late, that's time I sat waiting in a conference room for the other people in that meeting.

Of course, then there's the fact that there's never an agenda for any meetings, so they go on forever.

Okay, rant over.

Thanks for listening.

Seesaw

We all need to Vent sometimes!!!!!!!! VENT AWAY!!!💗👍

Also what your saying is understandable, it's hard to be productive, when others aren't honoring commitments​!

Can I add to the rant??

Most meetings I attend at work are inefficient and unfocused. I had one today that was supposed to last 30 minutes, but it lasted 2 hours. It should have taken 15 minutes. I had another one where everyone in the meeting had a different view of the 'problem' and we might as well have been talking in different languages. I left confused. After having those two meetings today, I am behind on my work.

Meetings should always have an agenda.

And right after I wrote this post I had to go sit in a meeting with no agenda and that last 15 minutes over the hour it was supposed to be. I had to excuse myself because I had another meeting to get to.

I once complained about those kinds of things at a meeting and my boss put me in charge of finding ways to better use meetings. My research revealed that the most productive meetings are un paid after hours with no food or beverage provided......of course that never happened and meetings continued to be a huge waste of time and money.

So true. One of my colleagues and I often hang out after work or call each other after hours and get stuff done on 5 minutes.

Again, fan of the agenda here. Unless the whole point is to brainstorm and even brainstorming can use parameters to keep it moving forward.

Oh absolutely. I work in a place where I can have things come up at the last minute all the time. But people just (1) cannot seem to be on time; and (2) cannot seem to show up for these things making me scramble to put them on the phone.

I have come to conclude it is just flat out disrespect. And until someone says something it will continue to happen. But say something and you are a "bad guy"

My boss is horrible with our one on ones. He's notorious for setting up a 1/2 hour meeting with me that ends up running over an hour. I had one 1 hour 40 minute meeting with him that was 1 hour 35 minutes of him bullying me and 5 minutes to discuss an issue I had requested he look into for me, which he still hasn't responded on. I left that meeting in a panic attack. He's gotten a little better, our last meeting didn't go over, as much, but that was because I told him that I needed the meeting to end on time so that I could continue working on a hot project.

I now block out a certain portion of my day on my calendar so that it's harder for him to set up appointments with me.

I've said things before in weekly memos that our Exec Asst does to remind people to be on time for meetings. I bring it up in group meetings and people just treat me like a hall monitor.

It's not just the disrespect, waiting for you for 15 minutes and then meeting going over by 15 minutes affects my productivity.

I'm glad I'm not alone in this.

Seesaw

Well 1:1s are a total different matter for me. If I can, if it's possible, I leave the door open to my supervisor's office. And we do have an agenda, and she's very good about adding things to the running agenda we keep. So we discuss the stuff on the agenda and then we're done. Which is exactly how I prefer it.

If we need to really discuss something and brainstorm, we'll schedule a separate meeting and bring other people in who might be related to the project.

I hate 1:1s for a variety of reasons. They make me paranoid. I can't prove what the person said or didn't say. I always follow-up with an email saying: just to confirm, this is what our action items from the meeting were, so they can confirm or add anything I missed. I also want to record 1:1s for two reasons: 1) I can have paranoia and a bad memory about how events happened, so referring back to the recording helps me nderstand and remember what happened and 2) people tend to behave better and be more reasonable when they know they are being recorded.

I especially hate 1:1s with someone I do not trust. I don't mind it with many of my co-workers because we're on the same page, and they aren't going to throw ego around or outright lie later on about what happened. When I had 1:1s with my CEO he would just talk AT me for an hour and then he often would come back months later saying he didn't say something that he did say and I had email confirmation from him, because I always follow-up meetings with action items and confirmation of policies we agreed upon. He didn't like that, and I think the fact that I've caught on to his weakness is why he's blacklisting me.

There is just so much productivity lost because of these terribly run meetings, too many meetings that could be handled by email request, and meetings that are scheduled for too long a time. I think it makes it harder on those of us with MI because it inflames our symptoms, so to speak - especially hypervigilance, paranoia, anxiety, panic attacks, agitation, anger, etc.

Seesaw

When people schedule things but break them off at the last minute it aggravates the hell out of me regardless of where it happens.

Like seriously, either stick to your plans or let those of us who actually have the intellectual capacity to plan ahead take charge and follow us like a good little lapdog haha

They make smartphone apps that alert you when an important event comes up; use them.

And just make a damn agenda! Let us know the parameters of the discussion so we know what we are discussing, and the leader write down actions items and lead the conversation so it ends on time.

My meetings always start and end on time, and we get **** done.

I have a facebook meme... a ribbon that says... "another meeting that could have been an e-mail."

My boss has done a great thing and cancelled certain meetings if a prompt memo is provided explaining what we would talk about at a meeting. This saves time to round people up.. travel time and expense... but guess what?

They don't file the memo on time and I have to nag them.

Basically I have come to presume that people are just too busy. I sound like Jerry Maguire all the time but we need to cut back and allow people to catch up. I notice when slow times start (close to holidays) people do their work. But no one seems to want to hear it.

I have this weekly check in with my boss, in which it could all.be dome via email. And the same with my assistant, she could update me via memo, and it would save a lot of time.

My team has a daily check-in meeting with our boss. Every morning...every day. I wish it would go away. The only good thing about it is my boss has an agenda and the meeting is usually done in less than 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the business partner I work with was so impressed with my boss's morning meeting, that she decided to have one with me daily too. Now, I have two 30 minutes meetings daily. The one with my business partner has no agenda and instead, she seems to use it to bounce ideas off of me and get organized for her day. I am going to have to figure out how to stop having that meeting....it is mostly a waste of time.

My meetings are infuriating for various reasons.

Faculty meetings are a waste of my time after school.
Our department meetings are a joke. Everything we're talking about could be an email.
The administration actively marginalizes my correlate.
My last parent teacher conference night featured the parent of ONE of my students.
Our department chair interrupts me during IEP meetings. If I'm the case manager, let me lead. I don't care if you also teach the student.
Also in IEP meetings, I wish my admin would quit playing Clash of Clans on his iPhone. We all know what you're doing.
Our psychologist is the most long winded person ever during eligibility meetings.

I hope you don't mind my vent in your vent, seesaw! Meetings are awful.

Hey, vent away. I'm glad actually to hear that I'm not the only one with bad managers.

I'll say it again. AGENDA!

This further confirms my hypothesis that employers are stuck in the early-mid 20th century way of doing things instead of the 21st century like they should be.

The telephone and internet are two of the best and most innovative inventions that humankind ever conceived, yet, many employers want people to do things the "old fashioned" way by coming up in person to a meeting when such trifling matters could easily be discussed by internet of phone.

This isn't all they are backwards in though. Look at the way most companies hire. They assume that people who are either shy during interviews or have errors in their resumes are automatically bad employees where those who are socially confident and have perfect resumes are good employees; a line of thinking that dates to back when the field of psychology was in it's infancy.

Another words: I'm using pure logic and reason to prove that these companies are ran by morons

Agenda? Haha.. funny. What is that. No one in my office knows.

I understand your frustration, although we don't suffer schedule problems as much as horrendous meetings in general. It is less productive, yet just as dramatic, as an episode of Jerry Springer - if a Jerry Springer episode was 2 hours long.

Well today I am going to need to attend part 2 of a meeting continued from Tuesday, run by my boss, on a project I'm not even involved in. The project is tanking because he has no idea what he's doing with this type of project. Part 1 of the meeting it was obvious that he had made no progress in the last month and that no one was happy with the direction, which created a lot of discussion and led to not being able to review the entire project. So what does he do? Instead of accepting the fact that he's going in the wrong direction, he sets up another hour long meeting to finish the review. Hello -- time to really look at what you've done and get it on track before you call another meeting. And he probably gets paid 3 to 4 times what I do since he's a SVP. The only projects of his that work are the ones he has other people (primarily me right now) do for him.

I truly feel your pain.

Starting to wonder if it isn't just employers. I suspect that there are people out there who either don't like to write or are bad at it. So they prefer to do everything in "in person" because this doesn't require them to focus. In person certain people are much better at pulling out nothing speak which makes them look like they know what they are doing (or they think it does) and the don't have to do any real prep.

I used to be on a condo board and with three trustees we would have an insanely long meeting because one of the people was one of these... in person people. What she tended to do *a lot* is use the time to insert things she wanted to talk about that were not relevant. Such as complain about a resident. Or she liked to ask questions. It was odd she would want to know, if X happened would Y result? And some of those questions simply had no answer. So you would tell her that and get the same question the next month.

I just quit because I was tired of the meeting (which started at 7) extending to 9.

Writing requires people to focus their thoughts... not add extraneous comments, and the person who receives it can continue to look at the e-mail when crafting a response to insure it is responsive.