Having too many meetings? Feeling tired and exhausted after being pinged on? It’s not you, it’s the medically researched and verifiable fact that meetings are bad for you:
They devised a pair of hypotheses, educatedly guessing that:
1. The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects; and
2. The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects.
Then they performed an experiment to test these two hypotheses. Thirty-seven volunteers each kept a diary for five working days, answering survey questions after every meeting they attended and also at the end of each day. That was the experiment.
The results speak volumes. “It is impressive,” Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, “that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload was found”. Their central insight, they say, is the concept of “the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals”.
So the question is whether the American worker/manager is spending too much of their time in meetings. The answer is yes according to one study as early as 1973, and technology seems only to have made the problem worse.
Interesting. Not that I offer any solutions to the problem (what’s the fun in that?), but interesting nonetheless.