Well-run meetings have agendas (unless the whole thing is a brainstorming session or something.) You look at the agenda, see what parts are potentially relevant to you, and ignore the rest with one ear open in case someone says your name.
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Yeah definitely too clever by half and I do understand the problem. When I need a decision from someone who is busy I talk to them in advance. I also ask staff to do the same with me. But then again I dont check mail during meetings as a point of professionalism.
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I currently have to deal with five hours or so of email a day and each day is packed with meetings, many as short as 15 minutes and 1 hour meetings being booked only in extraordinary circumstances. I have a list of 100 or so names of people that I’ve promised to meet, many who are very angry because we haven’t been able to even book a meeting on my calendar.
I aggressively turn down all kinds of request and am aggressively resigning from boards and other obligations, but each day, I receive a steady flow of meeting requests that I just can’t turn down.
I’ve chosen this path and I’m not complaining about the fact that I’m busy.
That’s definitely the humble-brag of someone who is a pathological micromanager. Unless the MIT Media Lab is currently in some acute crisis, there has to be a big chunk of this which can be delegated. Really, if the director only has to half pay attention, maybe they just shouldn’t be there at all? Aren’t they usually the ones scheduling the meeting in the first place?
Also, he’s probably setting himself up as a single point of failure. That can be disastrous if he ever has health problems or decides to take another job.
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Well good thing you’ve identified the obvious problem. You should write him a letter and explain it.
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That’s assuming a well-run meeting, yes.
Most of mine have been stand-up meetings, in an environment not used to, and not conducive to, agile development. I get to hear a lot of progress reports on small tasks that I’m not performing and not responsible for.
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Those if done right, like the weekly team meeting when I was with the server build group should be there as a placeholder and if all is well cancelled 80% of the time. Status updates can be done via IM or email with the lead.
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That would be true Agile, yes. This is waterfall or CMMI but some smart consultant person told them they should be doing Agile, and this is the best they could come up with.
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heck we just built boxes for the customers. nothing agile/scrum or whatever needed. if we had a meeting it was for company news that needed to be stated or heads up for a bigger than normal workload coming up and figuring out who would get what part of it or every now and then we met to discuss problems with multiple requests we had that were held up for one reason or another,
For what I’m working on at the moment, Agile is definitely needed because testing and development are so closely connected. But for most of us, it’s not really needed.
I’d rather have good CMMI than halfassed fake Agile any day.
I think the meta point that some folks are missing here is that no one does meetings right and that isn’t going to change ever. Most of us are employed by someone else (except for Joi here, effectively) and we’re directed to go to badly run meeting after badly run meeting with no means of changing the meeting culture or even getting rid of meetings. It is the ecosystem we live in.
I’m in charge of a few meetings at my work. Two of them are weekly hour long triages where a group of us work through security bugs, rate the severity of issues, make sure they’re assigned, moving through process, etc. It has a list of bugs. The other is my team meeting for seven engineers that work for me. It is once every two weeks for 30 minutes. I have them enter status updates on current work in a Google doc that we all share before we start. We go over any items from those status updates that they want to call out. We often end early.
I attend a lot more meetings than that. Often 15+ person meetings with a director or the like where we talk about whatever agenda he or she has set. Usually it has nothing to do with me except in passing but I still have to attend in case questions about my team or our security work come up. Things like that don’t get my full attention because they don’t need it.
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This might not work for this guy or everyone but … you can avoid meetings by a) declining if you were included as optional – people are afraid of declining b) telling organizer the meeting isn’t necessary at all if you can set things straight right there and then and c) ask to discuss “your part” first. d) ask to be excused after your part is obviously over
If you can get a nontrivial number of people to accurately and consistently self-report the urgency of each email they send; you probably don’t need a technical fix(and if you do; apparently reality itself bends to your whim, so you’ll get one). And if you can’t get people to do that, a lovely standardized metadata system with cross platform adoption would do little more than sit there and mock you, even if it existed.
It’s sort of like the ‘semantic web’ stuff: if ontology were a solved problem and people would just provide useful metadata; we could do neat things. In the crushing absence of both those conditions; no amount of faith and XML schemata can save you.
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Ugh, I’m so sick of this stuff in the tech world. People really do not know how to manage their own time and just say NO. This is not productivity. It’s inanity.
Your emails can wait. That’s why they sent email instead of calling/texting/im-ing.
You need to do less meetings.
Set a bug out time and stick to it.
Get sleep.
That will make all the other stuff go faster.
Oh yeah, and it’ll make you human again.
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Like that moment during a meeting when you catch someone else’s gaze and you both roll your eyes at the tedium of you current environment? 
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We have this problem at out city council meetings in Ann Arbor. Certain council members cannot be bothered to look at or listen to speakers during public hearings, presentations, etc. It has been going on for years, as long as I have been attending council meetings. Some times they even get up when someone is speaking and leave the room! It’s much less obvious now that the council chambers has been remodeled and the new seating prevents the “great unwashed” from looking over CM’s shoulders.
Well, he is the director of the entire Media Lab at MIT… He is also on a lot of nonprofit boards (he used to be on the board of the Mozilla Foundation for many years). Telling him to do less email when he says he has six or so hours of it a day is a non-starter.
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All of my meetings are videoconfernces. Laptop closed is not an option.
Also, phone calls would come somewhere around # 99. Do not call me. 
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I think if I was something like the president, then all my meetings would be partial attention meetings because I would need to have a lot of meetings. pay attention to all of them, fuggedaboutit.
So there I am in the meeting and everyone is sitting around super serious and I would have someone very smart sitting on my left hand side because someone super smart as my right-hand man - no way. And then this is the brilliant second part of my plan. I would have a notebook for writing little notes in and I would write ‘Nuke Al’…meaningless scribble follows with a couple of exclamation points and then I would pretend to fall asleep and my hand after a bit would fall away from the notebook so the super smart person on my left hand side would get all freaked out and spend the rest of the day having anxiety attacks after reading my little nuke note! HAH!
So anyway what I’m saying is you should elect me president because A. It’s basically the same thing you got right now only 2. I at least will only pretend to sleep and IX. There’s guaranteed to at least be one super smart person in the room who would be think nuclear war was no laughing matter. It wouldn’t be me of course, but whattayagonnado?
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The problem with the idea of “partial attention” meetings is that it isn’t clear what parts you should be paying attention to. I’m often in meetings that deal with projects other than my own and yes, sometimes my attention wanders. But generally the reason why I’m in on the meeting is that the people on the projects want input from people with different expertise. Which means the people presenting need to explain lots of details which may be critical to some listeners but irrelevant to others.
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I just sit down for those, claiming bum knees. I’m old enough it’s a plausible excuse.
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