Meeting me less than half way

Meetings are a necessary evil. For some reason, people have decided that we must gather and share information at work, and inevitably, it always boils down to "what have you been doing this week?". (I don't care about what I did, let alone want to even pretend to pay attention to what you did.)

After a while, even managers can't pretend that they are useful, and so end up saying "hey, let's make meetings more productive". But then everything goes wrong. Let's look at the productivity equation:

Meeting Productivity = Content / Time

There are two ways that productivity can be increased. The easiest way, that would appeal to people (especially those of us who recognise meetings as the pointless activities that they are), is to lessen the time of the meetings. Shorter, possibly, but even better, meetings less often. Yay!

So why, then, whenever anyone says "let's get more productive" the suggestion is always "let's have more content"?? And there are presentations, and guest speakers, and... AARRGGHH!!

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