Thinking Faster: Confusing busy with results

Jeffrey Phillips gets it. He runs Thinking Faster, a blog concerning office productivity. And today, he's written a duesy about people who confuse "busy" with "getting results". An abridged excerpt, to whet your appetite:

When I see a senior executive in as many meetings as this particular individual, I am certain of a few things:

1. He has not learned to delegate decision making
2. He has not learned to say "NO" to some things
3. He does not have time to think and to plan quietly
4. He's a manager, not a leader

Phillips really nails it here. I am fundamentally opposed to the idea of meetings as a productive tool. Meetings are where people who are in the loop attempt, to varying degrees of success, to bring people out of the loop up to speed. I know people where I work who will pretty much call a meeting at the drop of a hat. They craft beautifully laid out agendas and pass around copies for everyone at the table.

These people are worthless as employees, and perhaps also as human beings.

Why do I hold such vitriolic rage at meetings? Because a meeting in my mind is that day you had in second grade, you know the one, where the half-retarded kid couldn't find page 116 in his spelling book, and everybody else in the classroom had gotten there, and the teacher stops the lesson cold and walks this poor kid through the process of finding it. And it is a slow and agonizing five minute process by which one person tries to convey high-level numeric concepts like "less than", "greater than", and "equal to" to someone who was probably dropped on the head when he was a baby, and in the meantime 30 other kids are just twiddling their thumbs and not getting their state-sponsored education.

"What page are you on?" the teacher asks. Timothy looks at the page number. "54." "Do you think that page 116 is next to page 54, or do you think it's further back in the book?" This is a loaded question, and Timothy knows he's supposed to know the answer, but he just can't bring himself to say it.

Meetings are a lot like that. And the people who spend their days in meetings are cheating the system. They've found a way to get paid without doing any real work. (No, neither sitting on your ass nor listening to an idiot in a suit waste his breath is considered real work. Technically, writing blog entries all goddamn day isn't real work, either, but that's another story.) Embracing the culture of meetings is a lot like people saying "I want to be in that classroom where Timothy can't work a damn spelling book because otherwise, I might be learning something."

Meetings are an unfortunate necessity, and I admit they can be useful when used in moderation. If you're in a bunch of meetings every day, you're losing a huge chunk of time that could be better spent trying to get stuff done. Agreeing about what must be done is not getting something done. Getting something done is when you go out, implement a solution, and see that your problem has gone away. Not enough people do that anymore. Increasingly large quantities of people don't even know how. They're the ones who spend all their time in meetings.