A 60-minute meeting is about 59 minutes too long

Worst of all is the highly experienced 60-minute despot who has done their preparation and knows how thin the agenda is. They string it out from the get-go. They string out the get-go itself, stopping it from getting going. The beginning-stringer starts the meeting like a Melbourne Cup stayer. Easy does it, let’s take our time finding our position in the field. They extend their acknowledgment of Country with some improvised personal touches. They have certain issues with the minutes of the previous meeting, which nobody has read. You are in the hands of an expert here, and your hour is going to be as perfectly calibrated as they have decided. A professional jockey, they’ll bring this one home right on the 60-minute post.

Only lawyers and doctors used to be on this kind of clock, a single unit of time that shapes all else (the fact that lawyers and doctors fail to keep to it – always overshooting, never undershooting – should have warned us). The one-hour period is indoctrinated in schools and now applies almost universally to adult life. Do we blame Zoom, working from home and the pandemic? An hour is allocated, and that will be your sentence. In the absence of your physical presence, your virtual presence can be controlled through the autocracy of the one-hour Zoom peephole.

But it predated the pandemic, as shown by a 2019 research paper produced by Swiss company Doodle (an online ‘calendar tool’ that got eclipsed by the Zoom death star). It surveyed 6500 professionals in the US, UK and Germany based on 19 million meetings and found two-thirds of all meeting time was “unnecessary or a waste”. The economic cost was estimated at $US541 billion a year. “Cumulatively, 24 billion hours will be lost to pointless meetings in the next year.” Gee, and I was only cranky about 15 minutes.

Various irritants were held accountable – people being on their phones, not listening or arriving late – but it did catch my eye that 46 per cent of respondents said their biggest gripe was “People who talk about nothing for long periods of time”. That would be the meeting leader, the stringer. All of 91 per cent of respondents admitted that, because of poor meeting organisation, they daydreamed much of the hour away – 91 per cent! That is almost total groupthink, or non-think.

Cry freedom from the hourly grate. And it’s not that all meetings should be shorter than an hour. Some meetings legitimately need to go past the hour. But here the 60-minute despot also rules, because their loyalty to the clock is fundamentalist in its nature. A crucial discussion is going on, but if it threatens to take the meeting past the allocated hour, the despot cuts in with “Let’s not go over the hour, I know how busy you all are!” as if they’ve ever given your busy-ness a single thought. Their only thought is for the ticking clock.

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I have some sympathy for them, because they are as enslaved as you are. But don’t get me started on that extreme tyrant, the three-hour or four-hour meeting specialist. Who do they think they are, Fidel Castro? Are they getting paid by the hour? (Yes, and more than you.)

I have given precisely 900 words to this subject, which is the allocated space. Time is just one tyrant. Space is another. Death to all tyrants.

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