A ten hour long meeting

Day before yesterday, I started reading this book called ReWork by the founders of the famous 37 signals. There's nothing new in the book to be honest but it had best seller written all over it. Nuggets of one page quick-read "advice", interspersed with motivations "doodles", counter-intuitive tips that can assure success and anecdotes that dont necessarily fit in to the context. Nothing wrong with it. There is a constant demand for self-help books for the entrepreneur types (like me) and these are the people who are living the American entrepreneurial dream. Am sure a lot of people would love this book. I do too. 

So, one of the important themes in the book is about talking less and doing more. And one of the things that, in their opinion, makes you work lesser, is meetings. They say that if you drag 8 people in one hour meeting, its not really a one hour meeting, but its a 8 man-hour meeting. So what you achieve in those 8 hours must be economically worth 8 man-hours. Today I entered a meeting at 11 and came out of it at 9. Of course we broke for lunch, dinner, coffee, pee etc. But the point is, there were seven people in the meeting, for all these 10 hours and there were atleast 5 people on the sidelines. Of course these 5 people are amongst the lesser equals, so their time is not important. But the other 7 people, I think they bill mini-fortunes per hour to their respective companies and by the time today's meeting ended, their companies may be staring at a fiscal crisis, if not a prospect of bankruptcy.

We invested 70 man-hours of effort today in a meeting and I am not sure of the output. I am sure that in 70 hours, I could have done so much more. Here is an indicative list...

• Drive from Delhi to Mumbai. And back. One of the things on my bucket list, since I can remember.
• Log in a week full of ten hour days. This means, more than one fourth of my monthly work time.
• Write a novella. I am working on one and I could easily complete it at the rate of 300 words per hour. This post, 2700 words, took 9 hours.
• Walk 3,50,000 steps at the rate of 5000 steps per hour. Roughly about 300 KMs. Enough to reach some hill station to escape the heat in Delhi. And burn 17000 calories. Or lose 34 KGs of weight. Wow! I could actually be fit if I spent these 70 hours on myself.

I am sure there are many more amazing things that I could do if I had 70 hours to myself. But no, the job I do requires me to massage the egos and put everyone else's time ahead of mine. And today I read this amazing piece by KK. I can tell you that these 10 hour long meetings and reading people like KK is a bad bad combination. Worse than those alcohol induced tweets about your ex.

And yes, thats it for the day. Until tomorrow...

P.S.: I have stopped using the tag 1000WADv2, because if I am going to write everyday, I dont really need the tag. However if there are times when I dont write, or there are times when I have an announcement, I shall use it.