Some Thoughts on Meeting Inflation

I don't like meetings very much. I know they are sometimes necessary, and sometimes necessarily long, and I'll do them if I have to, but I mostly try to avoid them. If I need to communicate with others, I prefer to do it by email. That means that not everyone involved has to be paying full attention for a pre-reserved bloc of time, as long as the communications of all involved parties are timely to the matter being addressed. I'm not in the 911 dispatching business or anything like that. Most matters I deal with can be handled over the course of days, or at least hours, not minutes or seconds.

By "meetings," I don't just mean physical get-togethers around a table or in a convention hall. I include their "virtual" equivalents done with video conferencing, phone conferencing, and group messaging. And over time, I think I detect two distinct "meeting inflation" effects from the latter.

While I do very few "meetings" myself, I have family members who seem to spend a lot of time on them for both work and community (e.g. non-profit board) stuff, and they seem to spend a lot more time on them now than they did in 2006 or 2016.

The first "meeting inflation" effect is in the number of meetings. I've seen family members' work "meetings" go from "quick huddle at the beginning of the day, with maybe one a week or one a month for any given big project" to "half the day, every day is spent on four different Zoom meetings, and most of the other half is spent preparing for them."

The second "meeting inflation" effect is in the length of meetings, particularly the community types. They seem to have gone from "this is the agenda, with time assigned to each item, let's get through it" to "count on several 15-minute stream-of-consciousness rambles that seemingly have little or nothing to do with why we're meeting."

I'm a big fan of "work from home"/"telecommute" for people whose jobs can be done that way. It saves commute time. It saves gasoline costs. It means the workplace doesn't have to be a four-story building with 100 offices that must be cooled, heated, and lit 24/7.

Obviously the ability to "meet virtually" makes all that more doable. But if it also encourages dramatically increasing the time spent on, and in, those "meetings," it reduces the benefit.