One Unbearable Meeting

I need you to understand something about my relationship with the workplace calendar: it is adversarial. Every little colored block on there is a live grenade, and nine times out of ten it’s labeled ‘quick sync.’ There is no such thing as a quick sync. A quick sync is the corporate equivalent of a vampire asking to come inside just to borrow sugar.

I have sat through meetings that could have been a single sentence in an email, a sentence I would have read while making coffee, felt nothing about, and moved on with my day. Instead I gave up an hour of my one wild and precious life so someone named Trevor could ‘circle back’ on a decision that was made two Tuesdays ago.

The secret ingredient in most pointless meetings is me, quietly plotting my exit

Here’s the thing about pointless meetings nobody tells you when you’re twenty-two and excited about your first real job: they don’t announce themselves. They arrive disguised as ‘alignment.’ They wear a lanyard that says ‘strategic.’ And forty minutes in, you realize the entire agenda was one man discovering, out loud, in real time, that he does not understand the topic he called the meeting about.

I’ve started treating pointless meetings the way sailors treat storms – you don’t fight them, you just find the nearest sturdy object, brace yourself, and wait for the barometric pressure of human patience to drop to zero. My sturdy object is a notebook. Other people doodle. I write entire chapters. I have, on more than one occasion, plotted a character’s emotional arc during a discussion about whether the break room fridge needs a new sign-up sheet.

How to identify pointless meetings before they ruin your Tuesday

There are warning signs, if you know where to look. If the calendar invite has more attachments than agenda items, run. If someone opens with ‘I’ll keep this short,’ brace for ninety minutes. If the phrase ‘just so everyone’s on the same page’ gets used before anyone has said a single page-worthy thing, you are already trapped, and the only way out is through – through, or through the fine art of appearing to nod while composing an entire memoir in your skull.

I once watched a grown adult present a seventeen-slide deck to explain why we were removing a single word from a footer. Seventeen slides. I’ve written short stories with less plot development. By slide eleven I had already named the footer’s ghost, given it a tragic backstory, and decided it deserved better than this.

The economics of pointless meetings, or how I turned suffering into a royalty check

Somebody smarter than me should really study the economics here, because pointless meetings are the only workplace phenomenon that generates negative productivity and yet somehow gets scheduled again next week, same time, same link, same collective will to disappear. Multiply that wasted hour by every employee in the room, and you’ve essentially set fire to a small nation’s GDP just so one person could feel important for sixty minutes.

Personally, I’ve made peace with it, because I found the loophole: if the meeting is going to steal my time anyway, I might as well steal it back with interest. That one ninety-minute fever dream about a footer eventually became three pages of material. Another meeting, the one about ‘synergizing our synergy,’ became an entire chapter. At this point I don’t dread the invites. I RSVP ‘yes’ and mentally open a new document.

So no, I will not be turning my camera on for the 9 a.m. ‘quick touch base.’ I will, however, be taking excellent notes – just not about whatever Trevor thinks we’re discussing. Consider this my professional development. Consider it research. Consider it, frankly, the reason I have a book out at all, because nothing sharpens a woman’s material like ninety minutes of watching democracy die slowly in a shared document.

If you, too, have survived a meeting that produced absolutely nothing but somehow still ran long, congratulations – you have more in common with me than you’d like, and possibly more material than you realize. Write it down. Or better yet, buy the book, and let me have done the writing for you.