How do you survive a three-hour meeting without going insane?
Especially a meeting that starts at 4 p.m. and is supposed to last 90 minutes but keeps going on and on and on because issues of some importance to the future of the institution are on the table and they deserve full attention but you're having trouble producing coherent thought because you're stuck in a conference room for three hours at your stupidest time of day and you're getting hungry thirsty hangry tired annoyed and whatever you want to call the other symptoms of Long-Meeting Madness?
I sat through such a meeting last week and another is looming this afternoon, but this time I intend to come prepared. A previous provost used to bring M&M's to Faculty Council meetings on the theory that there's no situation that can't be improved by the addition of chocolate, but apparently our M&M budget got slashed so we sit there for three hours succumbing to tedium without food, drink, or rest-room breaks until we're nearly comatose.
But not today! My personal chocolate budget remains robust, so I intend to stock up before the meeting, and if my fellow Council members are nice to me and don't take my preferred chair, I may even share.
I don't have a problem remaining engaged in discussion on certain topics, but the list of topics on which I am willing to spend an hour debating the finer points is getting smaller by the minute. And then, of course, certain perennial topics keep coming up when they're most likely to distract us from more significant concerns; for instance, every minute we spend debating whether we should have to teach on Labor Day is time we can't devote to advising the Powers That Be on whether retiring colleagues should be replaced by tenure-track faculty members or adjuncts.
But nevertheless we keep spending time drowning in endless debates on matters that fail to register on my Make Me Care meter. It takes every ounce of self-control to sit still and look interested when what I really want to do is poke out my eyeballs with a dull pencil or run to the other side of the building and pull the fire alarm.
This week, though, I have a plan. When my attention wanders, I'll pop in a chocolate and surreptitiously pen lyrics for a new rap musical based on thick documents we've been asked to peruse. I'll start on the Tone at the Top rap as soon as I come up with a rhyme for no nefarious acts. Throw hilarious facts? Slow injurious yaks? Show me various jacks?
No rush. In three hours I'm bound to come up with a workable solution, which is more than I can say about many meetings.
3 comments:
If I'm being honest, I use my phone a lot. Unapologetically. Emails get answered. Sometimes referee reports get worked on. I write to-do lists and think deeply about projects.
A really good meeting lead will be able to table the endless debates-- take a vote on things, or promise not to discuss them until there's something that can actually be done.
Probably not applicable, but for many meetings at my job, we communicate with the manager ahead of time—“I can attend this, but have a hard stop at X time.” And then restate it at the start of the meeting itself and then leave politely when you hit that time.
In my job, we would only have a scheduled in-person meeting that ran from 4-5:30 if we had some sort of urgent problem happening, though. And if something was planned to run 4-7, the manager would be planning it as a working meal and the company would supply the meal. For something to planned to run 4-5:30 that went past time like you describe, it would need to be a due tomorrow and something late-breaking just happened that was going to necessitate late nights from all or most attendees. It's not unheard of to have stuff run over, but that's a really bad time for things to run over.
…honestly, the more I think about this—up to 5:30 isn't unreasonable, but as a mom with a young child, daycare closes at 6 p.m. Does your committee have no parents of younger kids on it? How is it not setting parents up for an unfair penalty if your meeting lead isn't controlling the meeting better?
Excellent questions. And in fact someone who's required to attend this meeting told me that he's grateful to have a small child who provides a fitting excuse to get out of the meeting early. The rest of us are not so fortunate. These meetings are supposed to end at 5:20 and sometimes manage to do so, but then important things come up and there we are at 7 finally finishing.
I took chocolate. It helped.
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