#oneaday Day 633: Garfield had it right all along

Pic unrelated. I was just experimenting.

I hate Mondays. I mean, I hate getting out of bed most days, but on Mondays it's always particularly challenging, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious, of course, is that getting out of bed on a Monday is an acknowledgement that the weekend is, in fact, over, and that you are going to have to do something vaguely useful with your existence for the next five days.

For me, I have the added annoyance that Monday is Meetings Day. I have one at 10am, another at 11am, sometimes another at 2pm and yet another at 3pm. Somewhere amid all that I have to figure out a week's worth of stuff to get done in the space of a couple of hours so that I can actually use the rest of my week in a manner that is productive and useful to the rest of the team.

I despise meetings. I always have. I'm not sure I've ever had a meeting that I walked out of where I felt "that was an excellent use of my time". I got in trouble at one job for finding a meeting so boring that I actually fell asleep in it. When working from home started, I discovered that I could literally go to bed and fall asleep during the 60-90 minute long "Good Morning Call" meetings we had every Tuesday at the job I was working at the time, and no-one ever noticed. I am the embodiment of the concept "This Meeting Could Have Been an Email".

And yet certain people are obsessed with the idea of having meetings. I'm talking generally here, not about anyone specific at my current or previous jobs — these are just some observations that I've seen over the course of various occasions of employment. But yes. Some people are obsessed with the idea that having everyone looking bored on Zoom or Teams several times a week is somehow productive, when in fact everyone would be much more productive if they were left alone to get on with their job, and only got bothered when someone specifically needed their attention on something.

I sort of get the justification. The idea is that if you all get together — preferably face-to-face — on a semi-regular basis, you will communicate better with one another because you are more likely to think of one another as actual people. But I can't help but feel there are much, much better ways to do this than Having A Meeting.

I don't know anyone who relishes the prospect of weekly meetings, at any job I have ever worked at. I know plenty of people who dread it, particularly if they have been forced into having to speak or present something, but no-one who actually enjoys these things. So why do we continue to insist on them?

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#oneaday Day 327: Catch-up club

I missed yesterday in all the excitement. We went to Ikea and had meatballs. Yes! What a tremendously exciting day that was. I joke, of course, but it was a perfectly nice day, and the last of my time off for my birthday, so I enjoyed just having time to relax.

Today, it's back to work, although it's only a couple of days and then a long weekend for the May Day bank holiday, so it's not so bad, even if I have to endure a bunch of meetings in the meantime between now and then. I'd much rather just get on with my work, y'know?

Meetings are a scourge of modern existence. I hate Microsoft Teams and find waking up to Teams notifications one of the most depressing things imaginable, but at least if your meetings are on Teams you can get on with other things while other people are rabbiting on about bollocks you don't care about or which aren't relevant to you.

I have to give a little credit to my job here: the meetings are, for the most part, reasonably helpful and productive, and there aren't too many of them. It's not like my last job, where we would have a meeting called the "Good Morning Call" every Tuesday morning, which involved sometimes up to two hours of listening to our French colleagues very slowly reading out everything from our project management tool. When COVID hit and we all started working from home, I actually took to going back to bed while this meeting was on speakerphone (and turning my microphone and camera off, obviously) — I literally slept through pretty much every one for about six months, and no-one ever noticed.

I feel like if meetings were completely eliminated from the weekly work calendar, everyone could get so much more done. Since more often than not, meetings are used as a means of going "what stage are we at and what needs doing?", it would be far more productive for everyone to just agree that, say, on a Monday morning they just send out an email saying what they're going to be working on and if they need anything from other people. "This meeting could have been an email" is a meme for a reason, after all.

Also, people who want a "quick call" to confirm something with you rather than just putting what they want in the chat or an email can get to fuck, too. I've got shit to do, and the last thing I want to spend time doing is sitting in an environment I feel uncomfortable (video chatting) when I could be just getting on with the big pile of shit that is continuing to build up while these distractions are happening.

Ahem. Anyway. Those are my thoughts on meetings. If you can successfully run a company without endless, pointless meetings, you have my respect. Keep it up. Your employees with thank you.

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1711: Soporific

I have… a problem.

Said problem is that if I have to sit still and do nothing while concentrating on someone else talking for any length of time, I get extremely sleepy, regardless of how tired I actually am. My eyelids start to get heavy, my body gets tired and all I want to do is just curl up and get comfortable for a bit of a nap.

This is a problem because the times when I am supposed to sit still, do nothing and concentrate on someone else talking for any length of time are generally occasions where it would be impolite to fall asleep. Weddings and funerals, for example, but also meetings.

I've suffered with this issue for as long as I can remember — certainly for as long as I've been an adult. I remember it happening on occasion at university during lectures, but more often than not this could be attributed to a heavy night out the previous evening and a hangover weighing on my mind. (My peers found it terribly amusing when I had to quietly slip out of our weekly piano workshop to go and be a bit sick. Well, I didn't want to throw up all over the Turner Sims concert hall.) At other times, I could fend it off by occupying my brain somewhat: either taking notes if I was actually interested in the subject of the lecture, or doodling the lecturer getting sucked off by some sort of sinister vacuum cleaner-like contraption if I wasn't. (This happened once; it wasn't something I found myself drawing on a regular basis.)

It's mildly embarrassing, but fortunately I've never managed to actually completely fall asleep before. I've come perilously close, I must admit, but I always manage to maintain my faculties and remain in the land of the living. I came perilously close on more than one teacher training day while I worked in schools, too, particularly since said training days tend to ignore everything we're ever taught about engaging people and helping them learn and instead tend to consist of someone waffling on and on and on for hours about something which is, quite possibly, a load of old bollocks.

The peculiar thing is the moment I step out of the situation where I'm supposed to be concentrating on someone else droning on about whatever, I can be back to full alertness in a matter of seconds, with no trace of tiredness. It's just that while I'm sitting there, expected to take in everything that is being said and actually retaining very little of it at all — usually because it's not relevant to me and thus immediately filtered out by my brain — my body appears to go into its shutdown sequence. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Or am I? That would be awful, and even more difficult to explain than falling asleep in a meeting already would be. But I guess we'll cross that bridge if — yes, if — we come to it!

#oneaday, Day 66: The Time Has Come

I'm going to write this in something of a rush because I need to go to bed. But I'm not going to default on my blogging just for pesky tiredness' sake! No, it might be a short, crap entry, but dammit if I'm not going to write on right now.

Anyway.

Tomorrow, I fly to Boston for PAX East. It's strange to think that this time has finally come. When I think back to early in this whole "one a day" experiment and the things I said, wondering whether or not I'd be able to go, wondering whether I'd be able to get out of my job, wondering if I'd ever make it to the States to see my friends whom I only know by their Twitter avatars and occasional glimpses of embarrassing photos on Facebook.

Now, that fantasy is a reality. Well, it will be very soon, anyway.

There are two emotions in my head right now. Immense excitement… and nerves. Almost like stage fright.

Anyone who's ever met anyone they've talked to online for a long period of time will know that the first face-to-face meeting is always the hardest. People are different online to how they are in reality, and however much you can protest that the way you write or chat online is your "true self", the fact is that people will judge you when they meet you for the first time – subconsciously in most cases, but they're doing it all the same. It's that that always unnerves me – whenever I'm meeting new people for the first time, not just trusted and beloved online friends, but anyone. It's a side-effect of the social anxiety that I've suffered for as long as I can remember, but I'm determined not to let it get in the way of an awesome time. And it doesn't have to. I met my wife face-to-face long after we met online, after all. And yes, I probably was an awkward twat – still am – but that one worked out just fine.

The fact I've met some members of the Squadron of Shame before will help – especially given the fact that we got on well the last time we met and didn't (to my knowledge, anyway) want to tear each others' throats out with hammers by the end of our time together. I feel like I know a lot of the others very well already thanks to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts and all manner of other media that makes "Internet gurus" and "online entrepreneurs" drool with glee. So I think it's going to be just fine.

Doesn't stop me feeling nervous, but it's not a sense of crippling anxiety. It's more a state of wanting the "introductions" phase to be over so we can kick back with some beers and then hit the show floor of PAX East running. Because there's an asston of stuff to see, and there's a bundle of people I want to meet. Quite how everything will fit into those few short days I'm in Boston is anyone's guess – but I'm going to make a damn good try of it.

So tomorrow morning at 8:40, I board a coach bound for DESTINY. That's right: DESTINY. (Then I catch a plane which will take me the rest of the way to DESTINY. But the coach trip comes first.)

I'm clearly getting delirious. Time for bed, I think. Good night!