> Why Am I Here? It seems like a good set of people, but I have no clue how I’m relevant to this meeting. I will sit here a bit and nod, but mostly, I’m wondering why someone thought my presence was a good idea.

These are the meetings where, after 2 or 3 times where my participation had little to no value in either direction and it was a recurring meeting, I just started bringing my laptop and working during. Some people say it's rude; I say what's rude is taking away 60 minutes of somebody's productive work time for no gain to them *or* to you.

Often the hardcore no-laptops people will reply "well just don't go to those meetings then", and hahahahahaha don't I wish we lived in a world where everybody had that option without getting fired, because if I had had the option to just not go I absolutely would have taken it. (The only time I had that power earlier in my career was when I had put my two weeks' notice in at one job, and a series of "handoff" meetings was scheduled. After the first one accomplished nothing I just declined the rest and focused on writing the handover doc I had already started working on... which was what I had suggested in the first place instead of meetings.)

> In the 20 minutes where we actually got Doug, Cindy, and about 50% of Jamal, we got side-tracked on issues that could have been a Slack thread after the fact and never actually made the decision we needed to make.

I had a whole series of these meetings that were attempted to be shoehorned into *30-minute* time slots, and since I was voluntold to be in charge of the project they were about, I told my manager *no more 30-minute meetings* on that, because they all went like this:

* One stakeholder (not always the same one, but always at least one) showed up 5 minutes late.
* The manager who had final say over everything was routinely not making it till 5-10 minutes in and catching him up so he felt informed was taking precious time. Or worse, he'd not show at all, and then there would be needless time spent relitigating decisions made in the meeting that he didn't like.
* Around 20 minutes or so people would start dropping off "to prep for their next meeting" ( I think a good bit of this was really "nothing useful is happening here but I can't say *that*").

So in a 30-minute meeting we got anywhere from 5-10 minutes of useful time at best, to negative time at worst if there was lengthy post-meeting cud-chewing of a decision by parties who hadn't attended.

So I said, either stop having them, or have them be at least 2 hours and make them a priority over other things for the people attending.

Suddenly instead of no progress like the previous four weeks, we began making progress in leaps and bounds even though the actual time scheduled for the meetings wasn't actually much greater.