I have been told that the Germans have a word for everything but it is the Dutch who have come up with the word that sums up the reality for my working life these days I think. Vergaderziekte: meeting sickness. At some point I think you end up attending so many of them that (a) you become immune to noticing whether there is any value in them or not and (b) they become how you measure your day. It almost becomes competitive.

There is certainly a meeting culture at this job but I think some(much) of it is on me.  I need to be more ruthless about just how many meetings I accept – I need to block out time every day where I have the opportunity to actually do the work identified in all these meetings – or at least better communicate what is going on in those meetings with my team. At the moment I really am not doing well enough at either of these things.

Part of the reason I feel like I am struggling is that I am trying not to bring work home with me. Sure I do research, reading and draft the odd paper but nothing like to the extent I have done in the past – this really has made things more difficult and maybe I am going to need to rethink that policy.

Anyway does anyone have a strategy for minimising meetings that I could experiment with? Any prescription gratefully received for this sickness 🙂

“Maybe meeting have become a life form capable of calling themselves and thus reproducing via human hosts”

Dilbert (Scott Adams)