Sutherland's "knife" gesture at council meeting

[Sugarphreak]

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[speedog]

What's the point of having meetings then if everyone is just tuning out on their phones?

[revelations]

^ for that 30 minute meeting, there might be 2-5 minutes of relevant stuff that you need to pay attention to.

Brainstorming sessions though - thats a whole other matter. Ideas (both good and bad) have to come out freely. No distractions.

[speedog]

So if you're the one chairing the meeting then why schedule it for 30 minutes if there's 2-5 minutes of relevant information? If it's a number of relevant 2-5 minute pieces that are importance to different people then why have everyone in the meeting when they could be more productive elsewhere?

[Sugarphreak]

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[J-hop]

Originally posted by speedog
So if you're the one chairing the meeting then why schedule it for 30 minutes if there's 2-5 minutes of relevant information? If it's a number of relevant 2-5 minute pieces that are importance to different people then why have everyone in the meeting when they could be more productive elsewhere?

Because management

[heavyD]

Originally posted by rage2
Druh's so hot.

Hot as in "Hot Garbage"? Come on Ward 7! Get this cancer out of city hall. You enablers owe it to the rest of the city as we have endured a 15+ year jail sentence of city hall silliness and it's time to remove the cancer and move on.

[HiTempguy1]

Originally posted by speedog
So if you're the one chairing the meeting then why schedule it for 30 minutes if there's 2-5 minutes of relevant information? If it's a number of relevant 2-5 minute pieces that are importance to different people then why have everyone in the meeting when they could be more productive elsewhere?

Management justifies their jobs by meetings

We've never been so slow at work, but management has never been so busy with meetings. No idea what they are talking about though, because it certainly isn't getting us any more work

[Sugarphreak]

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[HiTempguy1]

Originally posted by Sugarphreak


Said every underling ever.... haha

You know it

I've been in some of those meetings. I now actively try to get out of them at all costs. Horrible waste of time. Hell, even the immediate bossman hates them. He goes to them constantly and nothing moves forward/gets figured out.

We're a bit different than most companies I will admit, but still. With my own business, whenever I schedule meetings/sitdowns/conference calls, they are straight to the point and kept as short as possible, because I don't have time to deal with that crap.

[Sugarphreak]

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[J-hop]

Originally posted by Sugarphreak


Said every underling ever.... haha

There is a lot of truth to it though.

I work a very technical job but I spend around 10 hrs a week doing EPW (excel, PowerPoint, word) crap or going into meetings where about 5% of the material is relevant to me.

In a 40 hr work week this severely detracts from my ability to get technical work done resulting in usually a 50 hr work week to make up for the time wasted in meetings.

You can say that meetings are what you make of them which is true to a point. But if you work a very technical job outside of 1on1 sit down meetings you can never get into enough detail to draw much useful information. You basically need to know only a couple things (1) who worked on what so you know who to talk to (2) primary tools used (3) problems to watch out for (4) results. Beyond that for a technical worker the rest is pretty much useless. But management loves tacking on a bunch of fluff

[speedog]

Originally posted by Sugarphreak


I used to be the same way about a decade ago, hated meetings like that.... in fact, I used to excuse myself to take a fake call and just never come back, haha.

Later on though I started finding them a lot more useful. I am almost always missing information I needed to do my job, so I use the meetings as soap box to assign tasks with dates to everybody else. Then if they ignore me, I can send the project engineer after them instead of chasing them down myself. It is an excellent way to get management working for you.

I also use them as a way to repel office busy bodies... when somebody starts getting on my case because I didn't do something that they just thought of 10 seconds ago, I return to my meeting minutes and can basically point out that I never received formal instructions on it in the first place. They move on, and go bother somebody else after that.

In addition it has saved my ass countless times because I bring something up, people ignore me or don't follow up... but I get it recorded. Then a few weeks later when shit hits the fan and the client is screaming at everybody, I can point out that I raised the concern and was ignored/overruled.

I was attending close to 10 meetings each week in Calgary for various things. I found most of them fairly useful to me.

They are what you make of them in the end

I will say my new job involves no meetings, and I am at the mercy of the "he says - she says" crap. I constantly hear things like "You did this wrong, I told you this person to tell you that 3 weeks ago" or my favorite of "Why are you doing it this way, this is totally wrong, why would you do this without asking?" (meanwhile they forgot it was their instruction, but with no record of it, I get stuck with the blame). I miss my meetings

Were you one of the 'surfing on the phone' people in the meetings you attended?

[Sugarphreak]

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