I spent very little time on Facebook nowadays. When I am on it, I am either looking at all of my cooking and Instant Pot group posts or clicking out into a food- or travel-related article that someone I am Facebook friends with has posted. One friend posted this revelation of a status update that I could somewhat relate to now, especially since I’ve been working full time now over 11 years:

Three stages of career development:
1) I can’t wait to be important enough to be included in meetings.
2) I feel so important being part of all these meetings!
3) I need to think of something fast so I can avoid all these meetings.

So, to be fully transparent, I have never felt the urge of #1. I have certainly felt #2, especially when I was a manager at my last two companies (in retrospect, it was a false sense of importance. Everyone wants to feel “important” to some degree, but let’s face it: we’re all deluding ourselves. We are all still rats in the rat race at the end of the day). But #3 is definitely what I think of constantly. The number of meetings we have is truly out of control, and the all-time worse ones are the ones where they could have easily been replaced with a mass message to a Slack group or an email. We don’t really need to hear about bug updates or updates in services engagement processes in a meeting. Send a freaking email, and the same job gets done, but we just saved ourselves 30 minutes!

Internal meetings = the bane of my existence at work. We just need to stop 90% of them from happening.