I cannot sit through long meetings. Over an hour, you’re pushing it. Two hours? I’m entirely useless for the rest of the day. So when a co-worker proposed a four hour all staff meeting, I spoke my mind.

Every December we have a slew of planning and budgetary meetings for the following year. We plan them all to coincide with when our one out of office employee comes into town for a few days. A dozen meetings in a few days is a nightmare. They’re more or less a waste of time. Not everything in them warrants a company wide group discussion. Decide, and then pass along the highlights.

I think my attention span is limited for two reasons. One, I’m a thinker. And two, as the co-worker who proposed the four hour letting is quick to remind people, I’m a millennial.

 I’m a thinker, not a talker. I spend 98% of my time in meetings thinking about what’s being said and whether or not it could work. I work my wau through as many problems and outcomes as I can. That’s exhausting. For the people who don’t close their mouth in meetings, they probably think I’m not really there or I have nothing of value to say. I do, but I’m too busy thinking why their words won’t pan out. 

I am a millennial and as baby boomers like to tell me, it means I have no patience and I want everything done right away. That might be true, but it’s not because I’m in a specific generation. I think my generation just knows how to get shit done. We can work and talk. We can meet for five minutes and then have all the information we need to get to point B. We understand collaborative tools. We work on our own time, not in groups and still works out. 

So for those reasons alone, I cringe at the idea of any meeting over 90 minutes. And while while my old co-worker who wants the four hours to sit and talk might think I cannot use my brain more than two hours in the day, I certainly can but it just needs rest and reflection. And, for what it is worth, she also thinks these meetings will be productive and we’ll all just operate on high level ideas and we totally won’t get into the nitty gritty details of everything and then fight and bicker over it, she’ll sure be wrong.