Now You Know: Why Meetings Are a Waste of Time

There are certain things you always knew about life, but never had the scientific evidence to back up your observations. You know that yawning is contagious. You know that eating ice cream too fast will give you brain freeze. You also know that the weekly department meeting at 2pm every Tuesday is a complete waste of your time. And now, finally, there is scientific proof as to why you’ve always known that conference room just seemed to suck the intelligence out of people.

This article explains, “According to new research from Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, when people are in groups, they lose IQ points… Because it is a group setting some people will always fall back and remain quiet out of fear of rejection. ‘You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,’ said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study.”

We’re all heard there is power in numbers, and this is true if you’re campaigning for an election or waging a land war in Russia. However, at the office, where people are paid as individuals to be productive and smart, meeting in groups can actually have the opposite affect. We can all relate to this. Some coworkers are simply meeting mongers. They love meetings. They love speaking at meetings; they love the attention; they love explaining their thoughts as if they’ve just discovered a new planet. And while they are talking, the rest of us check out.

Some people just don’t do well in meetings, and this is unfortunate because often those people are the smartest people in the room—and this must be frustrating for them as their shyness and timidity is overshadowed by others who simply won’t shut up. Most office professionals don’t like meetings, a for a good—now scientific—reason.

How often do you participate in meetings? Let us know in the comment section.

Photo courtesy of kerryvaughan.