Letter 24: The real cost of excessive meetings and not enough creative time.
Rogue Humans is a weekly newsletter digging into the challenges of life in the modern world of work.
I haven’t had a consistent “in person” gig since 2020.
Prior to that I had coworkers that I met with every single day, in person.
And truthfully, most of the time I liked working with people face to face.
I’m an extrovert (though just barely, and less so every year) but I appreciated having the in person connection. Between having clear understandings of people’s body language and the ability to have short conversations before or after with folks in said meeting, it was a good time for connection and building relationships. Or even just laughing about stuff that has nothing to do with work.
And yes, there were still excessive meeting days in the pre-pandemic times, but it felt different than having a day full of remote meetings back to back without time to breathe.
Remote meetings are a completely different beast.
It’s been just about four years since all of our lives turned upside down.
Four years since I went home from work feeling like maybe the next day would feel like a snow day, but it became the snow day that never really ended.
Even today as I write this letter I’m sitting at home on my laptop, where I am just about every day.
Occasionally I do get a chance to give talks and go to conferences in person, and even get to teach sometimes in front of actual humans and not a computer screen, but most of the time, it’s this. Me and a screen.
I’m a writer and I’m an only child, so I most of the time when I’m working alone I don’t mind at all being absolutely solo, save for the 3 dogs I live with and my partner who works at home a few days a week (the rest is hybrid).
The solo focus stuff isn’t the problem - it’s the back to back to back meetings that can occur via Zoom or Teams or whatever that tends to zap my will to live. Then I’m left with no juice to be creative and do the job I really NEED to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love collaborating with humans. It’s what I do for a living.
But constant Zoom meetings isn’t collaboration - it’s exhaustive context switching that doesn’t give you a whole lot of wiggle room for much of anything.
It leaves us feeling the opposite of energized.
Instead we feel rather crispy, burnt out and we struggle to concentrate.
There’s good reason for that. According to some neuroscientists at Yale, our emotional state is not nearly as heightened when we’re meeting online. We’re actually numbing out a bit.
And while an occasional remote meeting is one thing, many of us spend every single day online, for hours on end, jumping from meeting to meeting.
Without a break from virtual meetings, we simply aren’t as likely to retain information.
So yes, breaks are important.
But what about the sheer VOLUME of meetings and the content of the meetings?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Rogue Humans - Let's Make Work Suck Less. to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.