Zombie Meetings are Killing Productivity

the living dead are for movies, not meetings

The habit of having meetings got much worse during the pandemic. You could lose a lose half your productivity if you keep it up.

Microsoft found that the number of meetings a week attended by the average user of Microsoft Teams more than doubled from February 2020 to February 2022, while the amount of time spent in meetings more than tripled.

We’re not seeing a parallel story about rising productivity here. The reverse situation is more like your reality.

What to do about it though?

The usual story is to make meetings more efficient through better preparation, agendas and conduct. 

Sure, that’s always important.

The problem though, is that we are having too many meetings. It does not need much analysis to reach the obvious solution. 

It’s time to stop it.

Some companies are now jumping in and axing meetings. In January 2023, Shopify deleted 12,000 events from staffers’ calendars and freed up some 95,000 hours.

Regular scheduled meetings are a major culprit and a good place to start. Are these just zombie meetings that should be killed off? 

If not, instead of weekly should they be fortnightly or monthly? Can they be held in half the time?

I noticed last week that readers were interested in the capability of the generative AI tool ChatGPT I mentioned. 

If you want to explore others, check out DiffusionBee, where you can download the software onto your computer and generate all the images you want, without limits. 

Or Consensus, which is in beta testing. You can ask a question and it tells you what the research says from published scientific papers. It is a way to do a quick reality test, which is handy in the current age of misinformation.

Beware though, as it looks like a surge of litigation is coming for generative AI. 

You don’t need a meeting to leverage these tools.

Until next week