I vividly remember being in a three-hour long a meeting.
We talked about stuff. The stuff seemed important. We jumped from one thing to another. Two hours in, I realised we were talking about talking about things. So I wasn't at all surprised when the end result was scheduling a follow-up to "catch up about it" next time.
Nothing screams "pointless meeting" like walking out of it with my calendar one meeting heavier and with more questions than when I started.
For three hours, we chased our own tail. I don't know what we would have done if we managed to catch it. I have a feeling that's why we didn't put in the work. We would have been clueless what to do with it if we did catch it.
Lots of movement. Zero progress.
Movement gets everyone nodding. Buzz words like "synergy," "ideation" and "excited" get thrown around. These words somehow convince everybody that talking about talking makes for a productive meeting.
Somehow, beats me why, someone always ends up saying, "This was super valuable, we should do this more often."
Fuck. No.
Valuable would have been literally anything else.
Valuable would have been to have this time back and the meeting be a shared doc for input, decisions via Slack or no decision at all.
Some things don't need meetings.
Revolutionary, I know!