The Root of Over-Meeting Culture - Anne Helen Petersen
annehelen.substack.com/p/the-root-of-over-meeting-culture
What Jamie wrote
This article covers a lot of ground, some I agree with and some less so. The anchor is this stat that the average Microsoft Teams member is spending 252% more time in meetings since February 2020. There are a lot of factors here, including the fact that in a remote environment there is no serendipity so you have to schedule everything.
However, the article misses one of the foundational reasons I think contributes to this. When you have meetings online, there are no physical constraints. From my own experiences I can see meetings have gotten larger. And I do think the fact that you don't need to find a new room, or order even more food for the larger group, contributes. There is no cost to the meeting organizer for adding more people, so people do.
Two things that we need:
- AI tools to summarize meetings so you can get caught up without being in them. This is here and coming to even more platforms.
- Some way of assessing a "cost" to the meeting organizer for the size and scope of the meeting. Physical logistics were a form of cost, but have lessened. Not sure what the future cost could be.