Limiting screen time is a current concern for a large percentage of parents. When I was a kid, my screen time was also regulated. Not by my parental units, but by the fact that we only had access to three channels, and except for Saturday morning, the programming was completely geared toward adults. It’s tough to get a seven year old to appreciate the humor of “All in the Family” long enough to sit through 30 minutes with commercials.
In contrast, my four year old has an unlimited supply of fun or educational cartoons available, sans commercials, 24/7.
But my screen time was also limited by the communication I received from society at large, which essentially boiled down to “Don’t watch TV, it will rot your brain.” The message was clear, time spent watching Voltron, Saved by the Bell, and wrastlin’ were all monumental wastes of time, even for children.
While I accepted the rhetoric, I still logged PLENTY of hours on the couch during my teen and early Twenties—mostly nursing hangovers. While I enjoyed the leisure of wasting entire afternoons watching Real World marathons, society’s message often nagged at me, even to the point of diminishing my enjoyment. “You’re wasting your time” was always present in the back of my conscious.
Then I became an adult.
And as an adult, I have watched millions of wasted man hours in the trivial pursuit of Corporate America’s favorite pastime… meetings.
Any human who has spent any amount of time behind cubicle walls knows the story of wasted hours. Although every meeting has different variables, so many of them have the same unpleasant and unproductive qualities: topic is too vague, no agenda, boring, tedious, doesn’t accomplish anything, and most effective meetings achieve the same results as a well-crafted two paragraph email.
Worker bees have also perfected a plethora of strategies to occupy themselves during meetings from hell. There’s the doodler, the note taker, the phone checker, the talker, and then there’s the silent type that are daydreaming of the beach, the mountains, or maybe even thinking about a past episode of Saved by the Bell. Myself, I’m a pincher. I pinch myself to stay awake, and to avoid screaming “You’re wasting my time!” as I turn over a table, and storm out of a bad meeting.
There are a plethora of blog posts and books with fantastic strategies for harnessing the power of meetings. But I have found the most effective way is to simply avoid them—at all costs.
While this may prove trickier to accomplish given your specific employment status, reduction and even elimination of meetings should be the goal. The marketing master, Seth Godin, provides some excellent strategies on meeting improvement and elimination here and here.
As an entrepreneur, I’m involved in different segments of the economy, and it’s interesting to see what role meetings play in various industries. For example, the manufacturing companies I monitor all have essential operational meetings to start and conclude every week. These gatherings are necessarily repetitive, but efficient. In essence, manufacturing processes constantly need tweaked and the line needs monitored, these factors reduce needless meetings.
Typically service industries have less meetings due to the fact that their employees are usually actively serving their customers. Finally, there are the governmental meetings I’m sometimes forced to attend. While I believe the role of a modern day government should be active and effective, in reality, government is only an accumulation of other human beings trapped inside of one non-stop meeting. If you have to attend governmental meetings, my only advice is to bring plenty of reading material. Sorry.
Some meetings are essential in moving the ball forward, but most are not. The ones that are time wasters need to be treated as such, and removed. Not tweaked, streamlined, or revamped, but eliminated.
At the end of the day, you can take control of your own time. For example, I’m skipping a meeting right now, and watching old episodes of Voltron on YouTube.
