Somebody's been complaining that I need to hurry up and post something new, and she's right. As usual. Just like she was right about me needing to hurry up and start this blog in the first place, instead of cheating and posting stuff on her blog instead.
As I noted back in December or thenabouts, January is a busy busy time for little Ricardibee. A rather long and tedious and not-even-slightly-finished report, which I should have been doing in, oh, November, is due at the end of the month, and a variety of other year-end and quarter-end and randomly assorted bits of progress reports and the like are in preparation. Not helped, of course, by the Dreaded Scourge of Those Who Wish to Get Things DoneTM:
Meetings.
Seventeen of them last week, to be specific. Sev-en-teen. I think that's a new record for me.
Including two at the same time (one of which I missed, surprisingly enough), and a conference call that I ducked out of shortly before it began.* That still leaves fifteen, though. And I'm not talking about casual chats in the office, or by the water cooler, or in the washroom - these were honest-to-goodness, scheduled meetings, all nicely written down in my day planner and suchlike.
Let's do some math, shall we? Fifteen meetings, times an average (optimistic, at that) of 45 minutes each, makes, oh...
[fires up calculator]
[types numbers in]
[presses the "=" button]
[realizes he could have done this in his head]
...almost THIRTEEN HOURS!!!
Now, I'm not totally against meetings, and in fact would rather deal with all manner of issues in a face-to-face discussion rather than by email. But, really now, THIRTEEN HOURS?
It's enough to drive me mad. Just think of the blog posting I could have gotten accomplished.**
*And I forgot to mention that at least two of those were with someone who, I kid you not, once roped me into a meeting to prepare for a meeting which was, in itself, designed to prepare for yet another meeting. He used to work for the government.
**Note to employer: blog posting does not happen during work hours. Especially not during meetings.
2 comments:
Who needs a brain when there's a calculator handy? I once actually did 56 x 1 on my calculator during maths because it was there and the mental arithmetic part of my brain has completely shut down since the end of Year 7.
Now, see? Was that so bad? Once you got started it was all okay wasn't it?
Yes, meetings. The scourge of the working class.
Meetings. Where the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
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