Percent of my work life spent in meetings:

But the poll is missing > 100

(Or maybe it just feels that way. Without a laptop, WiFi, and privacy screen, I'd never have time for any actual work.)

...you insensitive clod.

As a management consultant, I'm sad to say at least 50% (of my life, which is a lot). Fortunately, I've also found ways to be productive in meetings without being disruptive, and to turn down meetings longer than half hour (with very, very few exceptions).

Meetings are like a necessary evil, especially in a social, consensus-driven society like ours. I wonder if societies that are less "democratic" have any fewer meetings than ours.

Lately I feel these polls are more data gathering for Slashdot then the humorous/insight polls they use to be. What are the editors really up to? How many printers, how many screens (ui devices), how this how many that? No taco options or Cowboy Neil options....Were my tin foil hat on I'd speculate they are just a poor mans version of the marketing bots attached to almost every website around. "Want to know the demographics of /.'ers, we've got data for you".

As to meetings, they are a dirge to forward progress of development if they take more then 30 minutes in a day. I don't feel design discussions are meetings if there is a clear goal to be achieved. Status updates, reviews...these take way to long for their contribution to the overall project. I can't wait for the 22nd century so we can finally use this great 21st century technology to communicate and track projects. Lets begind the meme "I am the Office" and suffocate the idea that we need to actually get in a vehicle and drive to do actual work. Oh yeah, wont be around then...damn!

I've been in this IT business full-time for 22 years. Both as an employee and as a contractor. My experience has been that the number of meetings I am asked to attend is directly proportional to my pay.

I had 19 meetings last week. Somewhere between 15 and 22 is a typical week for me. And not a week goes by that I don't wish I could give up the money and go back to some quiet uninterrupted hacking. But I'm afraid that I'm not as sharp as I used to be. And the golden handcuffs are very strong.

Bottom line: If you're a geek, and you're happy, don't let them suck you into responsibility. Biggest mistake I ever made was cutting my hair. If I had to do it all over again, I'd stay the socially inept technical genius. Fuck them. Money isn't everything.

This poll's selections are clearly distributed improperly.

If you'd come to the meetings, that wouldn't have happened.

Try scheduling a "fake" meeting. Go into whatever calendaring application your organization uses and block out a few hours each day for a meeting with yourself that won't happen. You can even title the meeting with whatever you think you'll be working on (e.g., code review for new widget). If someone later finds you at your desk when said meeting was supposed to happen, you can always say that the other people couldn't make it but you decided to keep working on whatever it was at your cubicle.

I worked at a company in the mid-1990s that ran on meetings. No one did anything until there was a meeting to decided how something should be done. The only way to get anything done was to avoid enough meetings so that you could actually present a solution when the subject came up at a meeting you couldn't avoid. The technical people loved it but the bean counters, project managers and other non-technical folks hated it.

Cheers,
Dave

In 30 years of working in government contract aerospace, I learned a number of things about meetings. They're a social tool more than anything else.

I stopped attending as many meetings as I could avoid when I observed that the more meetings I attended, the more tasks I accumulated. I frequently found that I would leave a meeting more "behind" than when I entered it. I even drew a graph of "amount of work completed" on the Y-axis and "time spent in meetings" on the x-axis, with a y=1-x line to illustrate this.

Then I realized that the first order coefficient was greater than one, so that if one spent enough time in meetings, one would accumulate more work than one could perform outside of the conference room... so the curve became y=1-ax, with the axes conveniently labeled only at 0 and 100% so that I did not have to estimate the value of a (because that would be too much like work).

I also realized that the more people invited to a meeting, the fewer decisions would be made. I could tell this in advance, because if everyone showed up to a meeting with a large invite list, then everyone would want a voice, and consensus would be reached on fewer topics. If few people showed up, this was even worse, because no one would want to make a decision on anything without a quorum, even if the point was one of obvious consensus.

The exception to the above, however, was one in which one or more director level or above managers are invited. In this kind of a meeting, the object is not to build consensus, but to stroke the ego of the manager, or, if more than one is present, to allow them to engage in political sparring so that they may [re-]establish their rank order in the primate corporate hierarchy. If enough people did not show up to one of these meetings, they would task the people who did show with rounding up enough witnesses to their grandeur. But attending these meetings was risky, because if you showed up, you were likely to be assigned work if only to demonstrate your subordinate rank, but if you didn't show, you could be assigned the worst tasks as the beta primates laughed and said "We'll assign it to bughunter because he's not here," which was a means of demonstrating to the others that shit rolls downhill and they are on higher ground than you.

Now I work for a small company where meetings are unnecessary, I report to the CEO and he visits me twice a day to tell me I'm wrong even when I'm right. Meetings only happen when it's necessary to get the CEO and CTO in the same room so that they can compete for alpha male status. Otherwise, the company is small enough that they can visit every primate in their troop in a single day and throw shit on them personally; they don't need to gather them into small rooms and fling feces by the handful. But I do get a lot of work done.