Eli Qian

Dec 8 2022

Meetings

A 30-minute meeting does not take up 30 minutes of time. Scheduling the meeting, even with apps like Cron or Calendly, is non-trivial. Let’s say that coordinating a meeting take 5 minutes, on average. Before the meeting starts, I usually spend some time preparing. I need to set up my microphone/camera and review any relevant material. Let’s say this takes 10 minutes. After the meeting is over, I can’t just jump right into my next task. It takes a few minutes to decompress—let’s say 5 minutes again.

Suddenly, a 30-minute meeting is taking up 50(!) minutes of my time. This doesn’t even account for the mental space that some meetings take up. If it’s something higher-stakes, like an interview, I tend to stress about it throughout the day and even the day before.

Having multiple meetings in close-ish succession is the worst because I can’t really do anything meaningful in the 15-30 minutes between meetings. I mostly just sit there and worry about the upcoming one or scroll Twitter.

I’m starting to see the appeal of batching meetings into one day, but I don’t feel important enough to impose this restriction onto other people just yet. Maybe batching all calls into a 2-3 hour window, 3-4 days a week could help. The main problem here would be accommodating other time zones.

This is a difficult dilemma for me because, for the most part, I think the meetings I take are valuable. Most of the calls I take are to meet new people, which is something I enjoy. The remaining calls are usually work related and necessary to keep in sync. However, I rarely come out of a meeting feeling more energized than coming in. An afternoon with more than 3 calls can really stunt my ability to do anything else productive.