Things to do during boring office meetings

Good news! The world is slowly opening up. We are starting to get our lives back on track.

However, it cannot be denied that we are still living in a virtual world. Some dude had bat in his soup and we all ended up having food in our homes for months. Not just food, we ended up doing everything, from cooking to working, from homes.

Ah! WFH! The work-from-home privilege was considered to be a luxury. It signified that there really was something important for you to. Gone are the days when people would have looked down upon anyone who would dare to take (or even think of taking) a work from home. Some of you even miss those days of utter condescendence. Alas! How the tides have turned!

Let’s admit it. The meetings are boring. They make you believe the illusion that your opinions do matter, occasionally. Admit it, you’d rather be with your system, doing actual work, than be in the meeting which could have been summarized in 15 minutes and 10 bullet points. Does anyone even remember what M.O.M. really was? Where are the skilled souls who were responsible for this?

Being humans, our attention time span is minuscule. We would rather be anywhere else but here. <We get that you are bored. So are we. Hence, this article>

Once the paradigm shift happened life began to be viewed with a different lens altogether. People starting seeing their colleagues in the ever so expanding magnanimity of their computer screens. As long as the meetings were restricted to hearing just the voices, it was okay. But then, some manager started having the need to view their reportees face and smile as the poor chaps go through misery. We feel you, people! We feel you.

So, what do you do when you are made to sit in front of a screen (video on, audio off) and attend a discussion you have no clue about? Try one, maybe more, of the ideas listed below:

1. Take out a pen, a paper and pretend to make notes. It is quite possible than one has forgotten how their handwriting looks like. Remember the jokes we used to make about doctors and their handwriting? Yeah, that is on us now

2. In the process of making notes, were you to actually jot a few points down, then repeat them out loud. The person who actually made that point would love you for the rest of his/ her life

3. Repeat what was spoken just to make sure you remember some “key takeaways”

4. Download a PDF and start reading. Pro tip: Increase the font size so that you can read from afar. This will keep you glued to the screen and make others feel that you are interested in what they have to say

5. Open your calendar, look at your meetings and think what will you do to ensure that your sanity remains intact at the end of it

6. Change the status of meeting invites from “Accepted” to “Tentative”. Remember, it is how others perceive you that will determine your value during appraisals

7. Have a brilliant idea about a start-up. Then, look at the attendees and ask yourself if you would like to be the person who is speaking at the moment

8. Make a list of jargon that are prevalent in the company. My favourite ones are “impact”, “value” and “circle back”. There should be a course in college curriculum where students are taught how to make seemingly easy words sound more complicated

9. Open the messenger on your desktop and get in touch with your friends. Feel free to assume that they are also in a similar situation and are dying to get in touch with you

10. Create a profile on recruitment sites and pray that the next organization will have some work-around against such meetings (this sounded funny even to think about but, well, a human can hope)

11. Check out correspondence and long distance courses that are being offered by reputed universities and Ivy League institutions. Then, have a look at their fees structure and come to your own conclusion

12. Transfer the photos from your phones to your system and sort them into folders. Keep only those which will look good on Instagram

13. Look at old mails. Download the attachments and discard the old mails

14. Open the “Sent” folder and try remembering what were you high on when you sent those mails

15. Open LinkedIn and send connection requests to people left, right and center. One never knows which connection may come in handy. Besides, isn’t “networking” an important aspect of one’s career?

16. Go to YouTube. Open videos about motivational speeches. Bookmark them. Then, in the next equally sleep-inducing meeting, remove those bookmarks and mark new ones

17. Try guessing how bored others are in the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “super bored” and 10 being “outright murderous”

18. Write an article, just like this one which was engendered during one of corporate “brainstorming sessions”

19. Read this article again and share it with your friends

Do let us know down below how you spend your time in yawn-spawning meetings