I have recently discovered the best thing to do during long (>1 hr) boring meetings. Obviously you want to avoid these, but sometimes you can't. The common solution is to pull out your laptop and start sending email. For me this works for about an hour, after which I start to suffer from "email fatigue", the gooey minded state that results from sending too many emails too quickly. What to do then?
The answer: Cat photos. Whenever someone says something that is breathtaking in its shortsighted preoccupation with pointless minutiae—I'm not saying that this happened in my meeting, of course—don't check your email. Check your cat photos. Whenever the discussion comes back to the same old argument that people have been hashing out for years—again, this did not happen—cat photos. Never fails.
In time, you may come to like these meetings because of the unconscious association with cute photos. If that happens, you may want to lay off this strategy for a while.
If you have trouble finding cat photos on the Internet, just let me know and I'll be happy to send you some.
(Response that I got from a certain someone: "Not pictures of your girlfriend?" My answer: "Well, you were in some of them.")
The term we used for these meetings during undergrad was "WoT" (Waste of Time) as in "Uh oh, gotta go. I'm heading to my 11:00 WoT. (I.e., please email me some cat photos.)".
ReplyDelete