Meetings

Is it just me, or are meetings an astonishingly effective means of wasting an alarming amount of time?

The meeting I attended last Saturday (yes, Saturday - and no, I don't know what we discussed that could not have been covered in a meeting during actual business hours) consisted of fifteen people sitting around talking at each other. There was not a great deal of productive discussion because everyone was too busy throwing their point of view around to pay much attention at all to what anyone else was saying. Why we could not have put our ideas into writing and put them on a wiki or a website or the listserv and then actually taken the time to consider not only what other people were saying but what we wanted to say (and whether saying it at all was in fact necessary), I do not know.

Then there was the meeting I attended this morning. If we had just had wifi in the meeting room I could have accomplished a ton, but none of it would have had anything to do with what the meeting was supposedly about. I say "supposedly" because after about five minutes of stultifying boredom my brain shut down completely and I resorted to writing a to-do list, making art out of a roll of tape conveniently left on the table near me, and considering whether I could carve out a vacation sometime in the next few months. I think I said a couple of things during this meeting, but since I wasn't listening to myself I can't be sure. However, no one else was listening to me either, so it can't have mattered much. This particular group seems to meet mostly to repeat things they have already said, to state the obvious with various degrees of clarity, and to make themselves feel important. You would think I would have learned by now just how big a waste of time this is. Next month, I'm bringing a book.

Although even this morning's meeting was not as bad as one I attended earlier this week. (See? My job really is to fill out paperwork and go to meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.) We hadn't even made it half way through the day when I decided that this is hopeless. Not just the sitting through a meeting and expecting a solution from it. The whole task of being a library director in South Carolina is just hopeless. There is so much that we could be doing - if we had the people, or the money, or the space, or the infrastructure, or if things hadn't been done some other way for the past twenty years. But I as an individual am simply never going to be able to make enough of a difference to matter. Which was brought home to me quite forcibly somewhere around eleven thirty on Tuesday morning. This is not the fault of the person running the meeting, of course. It was just sort of the cumulative effect of the whole agenda.

So, what's worse than a meeting that is so boring you wish someone would start throwing rocks just because it would make a change? A meeting at which you realize that change is never going to happen, and that the job you do might as well involve beating your head against a brick wall for all the effect it's going to have.

Sigh.