You're deep in your work, banging away on your code, your spec, etc. A "meeting has started" notification jumps up on your computer desktop. "Oh shoot, it's already 11am." You click the Join button and you're immediately pulled into the meeting with everyone else. You see that people are still assembling on the call, so you quickly switch back over to your work window and crank out a little more. "It's just while I'm waiting for people to get here," you tell yourself. And then, after everyone arrives and the meeting starts, you turn one ear to that conversation as you try to find a stopping point in your own work. Another five minutes later, you close your work window and turn your attention to the meeting.
Virtual meetings have made this experience the norm. But it's a bad norm. Every single time this happens, you are reinforcing two of the biggest complaints about meetings: they start slow and they take too long. Meetings start slow because people are slow to turn their attention to the meeting itself. Meetings take too long because what begins as five minutes of parallel "wrap-up work" grows over time to ten or fifteen minutes, resulting in more repeating and rehashing in the meeting as participants finally engage in the meeting.
The problem isn't the meeting, it's what happened before the meeting. Or, more precisely, what didn't happen before the meeting. If you had spent five minutes before the meeting getting yourself to a better stopping point on your work, you could have showed up fully present for that meeting from the second it started.
Precisely placed mini wrap-up sessions in your workday will have you end the day feeling on top of all of your work rather than feeling buried under all of it.
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