Jeez, no kidding. The amount of time spent in meetings is inversely related to productive moments.
Slashdot notes:
Meetings are Bad For You
“Though this is obvious to most of us, your PHB's might benefit from knowing that meetings are bad for you. Two psychologists have found evidence that the number of and the time spent in meetings has a detrimental effect on mood. ”...a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and subjective workload was found“, write the authors after conducting a diary study.
more from the
Guardian UKLuong and Rogelberg used those and other discoveries as a basis for their own innovatively broad theory.
They devised a pair of hypotheses, educatedly guessing that:
1. The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects; and
2. The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects.
Then they performed an experiment to test these two hypotheses. Thirty-seven volunteers each kept a diary for five working days, answering survey questions after every meeting they attended and also at the end of each day. That was the experiment.
The results speak volumes. ”It is impressive,“ Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, ”that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and subjective workload was found“. Their central insight, they say, is the concept of ”the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals“.
Tags: psychology, /science
