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name: will baker blogrollin' other sites: |
did you get that thing i sent ya?
I have a meeting scheduled at 3 PM on Thursday. This meeting is an orientation for an all-day meeting on Friday. I have the same two meetings next week. So 10 hours of my week are immediately unavailable for the actual doing of actual work, to say nothing of how totally, patently, self-evidently stupid (and I meanretarded) it is to hold meetings to get ready for meetings. What has become of the culture of work in this country? It�s like people will do anything in the workplace, no matter how dull, stupid, or blatantly time-wasting�as long as they�re not actually working. When you add to these meetings the average of 3 hours I spend each Monday in the management team meeting, you�ll find that for two weeks, I�ll be spending almost exactly 1/3 (13 hours a week!) of my work time in meetings, which is substantially more than the already-ludicrous 25% average. Now when I say �my worktime�, I mean the 40 hour week for which my paycheck officially compensates me. But anyone who�s salaried knows full well that deliverables still have to be delivered, whether your boss made you spend your whole week rotting in the conference room or not. So we work overtime, which brings our ratio of bullshit-meetings-to-actual-work-time back into the world of sanity, but also painfully reduces our actual hourly pay. Because there�s a growing body of research into just exactly how much time is wasted on meetings in American workplaces, I know I�m not alone in this affliction. But I do think my workplace is slightly more predisposed to meeting madness than most. Other than the Finance Manager and I, everyone on our management team is in a �helping profession� (counselors, social workers, etc.). On a pretty basic level, they work by talking. And I�m not suggesting that their work isn�t hard, or highly specialized, or real and important, because I believe it�s all of those things. But I am suggesting that because talk is the medium of productivity in their fields, they are more disposed to assume work is getting done because things are being talked about. But when I�m sitting in a meeting, I am by definition not working. What�s worse is that meetings tend to generate more half-baked, ill-conceived projects and ideas. Which means that while I�m sitting there not doing my work, more work is being added on to my pile! What all these talking professionals need to understand is that it takes time to write code. It takes time to build a database. Work like mine takes more than a spiffy idea and some conversation. It involves the actual making of actual things that either will or will not work. This takes time�sweet, precious, uninterrupted time. I could go on at great length about how all of this is completely typical of contemporary American culture, with its elevation of process over substance, appearance over reality, and talk over work. But it�s midnight, and I�m tired, and the cat just bit my foot. So I think I�ll say good night.
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