MCF's Many Meetings

”Let's touch base.”

“We should talk.”

“That will be discussed in the brief.”

“I think it would be a good idea to have a post-mortem on the catalogs.”

“Can you stop by when you have a chance?”

“All employees are required to attend this mandatory seminar.”

“Can we get together to go over this sometime next week?”

“We'll go ahead and schedule a gathering in conference room G.”

“I'd like to review things.”

“Please keep me in the loop.”

“I'll go ahead and set up that meeting since your calendar is free.”

Meetings are an occupational hazard of office life, a not-always-necessary evil. Some things can be resolved through e-mail or a phone call yet some people prefer to meet, and have over a dozen different ways of saying as much. Some days meetings are good; others only serve to go over the work we have to do, the work we COULD be doing if we were only at our desk. Perhaps this is why I was unable to watch The Office— the one episode I did watch hit too close to home, with one of the characters longingly gazing out at his desk from a conference room where he was held prisoner in a nonsense seminar, doomed to miss an important phone call and sale.

I'm easily distracted and have difficulty focusing when tasked with too many separate assignments. Yet in the right frame of mind, and when I do get into my groove, I can generally make up the time lost in meetings, personal e-mails, business e-mails, and casual conversations. There have been days when I've lost entire mornings to meetings, only to recover around 2:30 and put together a 24 page catalog, several flyers and possible a book jacket. Today was anything but one of those days.

An issue I cannot go into in a public forum involving something my predecessor had worked on more than two years ago needed to be resolved. It required a brief meeting in which she and I approached people in the company who could help us solve the issue. With them on the case and checking records, I only had a moment to have a sip of juice before dashing off to my 10AM meeting. The memos and documentation we receive to begin a catalog from our editors and marketing people are thorough, possibly the most thorough in the company, but we're still required to meet as a group to review them. It didn't take an hour, so people found other things to talk about to “fill” the half hour we had remaining.

That meeting finished a few minutes before my 11AM meeting, which gave me just enough time to listen to my voice mail and hear that my parents got to my dad's doctor safely. I quickly glanced at my growing unread e-mail but now had to run to my 11AM. This one was a monthly meeting with my supervisor's boss and his team, to review how everyone is doing with the new workload and process. We meet about our new meetings for an hour, once a month. With so many meetings going on across the company, it's common for a conference room to be double-booked, as was the case today. Fortunately, the room had a divider which apparently only I held the secret to engaging, mostly because my elementary school gymnasium/cafeteria had the same sort of accordion wall that my classmates enjoyed entombing me in from time to time. School really DOES prepare one for the “real” world. As some of my coworkers quipped that maybe office services was looking for help, I unabashedly agreed that such a job would be “less stressful”, loudly and in earshot of both of my supervisors. After the meeting, someone needed both conference rooms with the wall open, so I stuck around to help restore the room to its previous state.

Finally I had time to sift through the large volume of e-mails that had accumulated before the most important meeting of the day, Lunch™. There may have been work to do, but I felt better prepared to face it after a nutritious meal somewhere new(for me), and becoming engrossed in the cartoon-like antics of various mice in PetCo. I watched the little white things with big red eyes running around a glass box, futilely climbing through plastic tunnels and running along wheels, going in circles but never making any progress to get out of the box. I didn't realize until I wrote the preceding sentence that it was empathy which gravitated me toward them.

I was barely back at my desk for ten minutes before someone reminded me of a mandatory seminar on a new e-mail program. There were other sessions tomorrow, but it was first-come, first-serve, and so I decided to get it over with. It was just as basic and useless to me as I expected it to be, and after putting my name on the sign-in sheet I really could have(should have) cut out early. When I got back to my desk, my boss had left a message saying he wanted to meet to discuss one of my jobs, but he had already left for the day. It was well after 4PM by the time I started working, really started working. I broke my vow to myself not to stay past 5:30-6 for the first time in weeks, but did leave things unfinished. Normally, I work until I'm done with everything, but tonight I just did as much as I could by 6:30, called it quits, and went running in the gym. Tomorrow is another day and I actually don't have ANY meetings scheduled, so I might be able to tackle things. The voice in my head that says “it never ends” has slowly been drowned out by the one that realizes “I always get it done”. I think it's healthier for me that way, but it takes a conscious effort sometimes. I've NEVER missed a deadline, so I should have more faith in my abilities.

OK, I want everyone to review this post and then let my receptionist know when the best time would be for us to touch base and discuss what was said. I realize many of you live in different states, and even different countries, so perhaps we'll have to be flexible with the scheduling. If absolutely unavoidable, some of you will have to teleconference. Be sure to come prepared with jokes and anecdotes about your families and personal lives, or maybe to discuss films you've seen recently. We really don't want to delve into the subject matter of the meeting until we've been sitting around the conference table for a good 15-20 minutes. Afterwards, we'll set up a post-mortem to go over the discussion, and to discuss how we feel it went. Then a survey asking for your thoughts on the post-mortem and the blog meeting will be issued and, once we have the results, we'll have several meetings to discuss them and formulate an action plan.

Scott Adams, you beat me to the perfect escape plan.