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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
Imagine lying on your death bed and thinking - I've had a good run. I went to a lot of meetings
He doesn't use the term himself, but Son Number One is one of those digital nomads : theoretically, he can work from anywhere in the world. Realistically, it's better for him to be in the Americas . He works for a company based in New York , and his working day has to conform to those hours. He's in Ireland at the moment, but because of the time difference, he has to work until 10 or 11 at night. But it's temporary. He'll return to that part of the world soon because he likes living there. The job suits him too – not just because it affords him mobility, but because the company is young with only a handful of employees. It is work, but it has a sense of freedom to it. Or at least, it had. It's a typical story of modern commerce. The small company did well, and eventually the owners were offered irresistible sums to sell. Suddenly, Son Number One found himself as the employee of a much larger corporate entity. Previously, he would communicate with the New York office when it was necessary. Everyone stuck to the point. Now he has to endure the tyranny of regular scheduled online meetings, with as many as 60 people taking part. READ MORE He listens to people he doesn't know, and will never meet, spouting corporate word salads about other businesses that have nothing to do with him. This is not an untypical experience. Most meetings are, at best, a waste of the working day, and at worst, an egregious, soul-sucking waste of life itself; the drone of other voices reflecting the tick-tick-tick of mortality's clock. And it's asking you: what are you doing here? Don't you realise you'll be dead soon? You may have had this experience yourself: there's a regular meeting you have to attend, but it's not clear what the meeting is for. Invariably, there will be one or two people there who will extemporise at length; and not because there is some pressing point they need to make. They just like talking. For them, it's not a functional exchange of information, more like a bit of a chat. Meanwhile, you keep your phone in your lap, and exchange gossipy messages with people at the same meeting. Not that meetings can't be useful, or even necessary. It's just that all too often they are meetings for the sake of it; which can result in a decision to have another meeting. I'm far from the first person to point this out. There's any number of management guru types offering advice on how to make the system more effective. It's become something of a cottage industry, along with studies on how much time and money is wasted going to meetings. According to figures from the US , the majority of employees spend a third of their week at them, which in turn costs the American economy $37 billion (€31.5 billion) a year. [ I was unfazed by a near car crash, so why does a dental visit leave me quivering? Opens in new window ] The higher up the management chain you go, the more meetings you attend: to the point, presumably, when you do nothing but attend meetings. You spend your day discussing work, but you don't actually do any. Management gurus will argue that this is merely the result of dumb habit: all it requires is to take the (supposedly) counterintuitive step of scheduling fewer meetings. You'd wonder why so many large companies, bent on maximising productivity, haven't figured that out already. It could be that meetings have another, unspoken function. Forcing employees to waste their time by attending reminds them who the boss is. And for those bosses, it's a display of status, a function of busyness culture: where being run off your feet is an unquestioned good; a way of marking the worth of a life. Imagine lying on your death bed and thinking: I've had a good run. I went to a lot of meetings.
Irish Times
13-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Irish people are great with words but we're terrible communicators
There was one weekend when I attempted to get all my children around the same dinner table. They were all in the country, though that window of opportunity didn't last long. Son Number One had just returned from Colombia, only to get on to another plane to attend a wedding in Portugal. Then Daughter Number Two couldn't come because it was weekend of the Pride Festival and 'we have the Estonian lesbians staying over'. I had no idea what that meant, but subsequently learned that she and her partner had found themselves in a typically Irish situation. On holidays some months before, they had befriended some Estonian women and had extended an invitation to them to visit Ireland. But this was an Irish holiday promise, the kind we've all made and don't believe will ever be accepted. You mean it at the time, of course, but it's likely that the following day, you've forgotten all about it. If they had invited some Irish lesbians – or Irish people of any sexuality – they would have instinctively known that several more steps would be required to establish the veracity of the offer. Regular contact over subsequent weeks and, crucially, a reissuing of the invitation at least twice. I'm not saying that Daughter Number Two and her partner didn't enjoy having their new Estonian friends come to stay; just that they were a little shocked at the northern European predilection for assuming that if you say something, that's what you actually mean. READ MORE That's the thing foreigners don't get about the Irish. We're great with words. But that doesn't mean we're great at communicating. Saying to an Irish person that you don't feel like talking can all too often be construed as a bit insulting My get-the-kids-together plan now completely scuppered, Daughter Number Three then pulled out, but in a refreshingly un-Irish way. She said she was tired and 'socially drained'. She had returned from London a couple of days before, met various friends and had to answer questions from them that she would be asked again by me if she had come over for dinner. And she didn't have the energy to do it. It's a rare day when someone refuses your invitation and you admire them for it, but I did. My day job is to talk for a living on the radio, and when I'm finished my professional nattering, I often feel I have nothing left to say. Except, unlike Daughter Number Three, I wouldn't have the courage to admit it. No matter how carefully you phrase it, saying to an Irish person that you don't feel like talking can all too often be construed as a bit insulting – that you don't feel like talking to them. Because we're Irish, and when we communicate, it's not entirely clear what we actually mean. The guest list was now reduced to Daughter Number One, her partner and Granddaughter Number One: a situation we both handled in the typically Irish way of trying to second-guess each other. She messaged me to ask if they should still come over, or did I want to leave it to another day when all the others could come? She was providing me with an escape route. But I didn't want one, and I certainly didn't want her to think that I didn't want her to come, just because the others couldn't. So I replied: come over. But almost immediately, I became plagued with doubt. Perhaps she didn't want to give me an escape route, but for me to provide her with one. Perhaps they were tired, or stressed and were quietly relieved that my dinner plan had disintegrated. But, being Irish, they were never going to say that out loud. I became so transfixed with this idea that when they arrived, I immediately apologised for dragging them across Dublin. But they said they were happy to come. We had dinner, and when they were leaving, they said they'd had a nice time. And they meant it. At least, I think they did.
