Now this is Exciting!

This is where having a lot of meetings becomes a problem. When you need to do focused work, you wind up doing it after hours. That’s not sustainable. The other thing that this constant multitasking does is it feeds on itself. Picture this, if you will.

You schedule a meeting to discuss the project status. Half of the people at that meeting are squeezing it in between other meetings and thus are multi-tasking during the status meeting. You can watch them on camera answering emails while the discussion is going on, or they are wily enough to do it off-camera but aren’t engaged.

After the meeting, someone sends an email summarizing the conversation, which is responded to by one of the people who were multi-tasking with questions they didn’t ask during the meeting. This prompts another meeting to go over those questions.

Might it work better if the project status was done in writing, asynchronously, and the meeting never needed to happen?