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UK workers waste a year of their lives in useless meetings

daftandbarmy

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FYI... oops, gotta jet to another meeting  ;D

UK workers waste a year of their lives in useless meetings

Meetings that drag on and on. Nebulous agendas. Pointless tangents. All of those wasted hours add up to a year lost in the average office worker's life, according to a new survey by Officebroker.com.

It's official: you are wasting your life away in meetings. A new report has surveyed 500 office workers to find out how many hours are spent in meetings, on average, and what percentage of these meetings are actually useful.
The results show that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week (!), and that around a quarter of this time is usually wasted. That's four hours of pointless meetings every week. Or a weekly Gone With the Wind screening.
Over a year, this works out to more than 200 hours - or almost nine full 24-hour days. Over a career, the total is even more alarming with the average worker sitting through around 9,000 hours of needless meetings - a full year and ten days spent twiddling their thumbs.

For workers in the public sector, the time spent in pointless meetings is even higher. Civil servants spend an epic 22 hours a week in meetings with one third of that time estimated to be surplus to requirements.

That means for public sector workers the career total of time wasted in pointless meetings is one full year and 322 full days. Nearly two years of gassing on the public purse. Perhaps Osborne should consider banning meetings entirely in his Wednesday Budget?

According to the office workers surveyed, time is mostly wasted in meetings by going round in circles, having irrelevant agenda items and hours of endless discussions without resolution.

One worker who took part in the study commented: 'Meetings are important but sometimes they do go on forever. You always get one or two people who just want to use meetings as a chance to hear their own voice. Then there are times when it feels like you are in a meeting about future meetings. It can be mind-numbingly tedious.'

Another respondent said: 'I work for the local authority and the number of meetings I have to attend is quite unbelievable. I'm required at attend meetings just about every day of the week. Sometimes it feels like I spend more of my time inside meetings talking about my job than I do sat behind my desk doing it.'

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/1175002/
 
But having lived in the UK, at least they always have biscuits at these meetings!!  If sitting on their arse does not kill them, the sugar will... :)  I miss the jammy dodgers...
 
PAdm said:
But having lived in the UK, at least they always have biscuits at these meetings!!  If sitting on their arse does not kill them, the sugar will... :)  I miss the jammy dodgers...

Oh, so YOU'RE the one who sniped the jammy dodgers before they got to my end of the table?  :nod:
 
Obviously, we need to stand up a committee to look into this.
 
daftandbarmy said:
Oh, so YOU'RE the one who sniped the jammy dodgers before they got to my end of the table?  :nod:

Sorry.......I was hungry  :temptation:
 
I've found that meetings come in threes:

1.  The pre-meeting meeting to discuss what you're going to talk about in the meeting and ensure that everyone in your group is on the same page.

2.  The actual meeting.

3.  The post-meeting meeting to discuss how the meeting failed to meet objectives and how the next pre-meeting meeting should meet to ensure success.  ;D
 
sent the link to a few work mates. Apparently we're having an office wide meeting on this later today now. ::)
 
Dirt Digger said:
I've found that meetings come in threes:

1.  The pre-meeting meeting to discuss what you're going to talk about in the meeting and ensure that everyone in your group is on the same page.

2.  The actual meeting.

3.  The post-meeting meeting to discuss how the meeting failed to meet objectives and how the next pre-meeting meeting should meet to ensure success.  ;D

So I guess the typing I heard from the next cubicle over was you...

Pre-meeting tomorrow!
 
This whole thing makes perfectly good sense, since all of the meetings I end up sucked into seem to last a lifetime.

And you feel like driving your pen deep into your chest just to put yourself out of misery.

The only exception is when you want to plunge the pen deep into someone else' chest to shut them up, thus ending this life sucking meeting early.


But other than that, I've learned to play well with others. ;D
 
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