Bored? Have you read everything on your phone twice? Drooping eyelids?
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We've all known the feeling as the deputy (acting) head of section spells out the work targets from the spreadsheet - and then repeats for emphasis.
It's warm outside - and warmer inside. The afternoon seems interminable, as does his droning presentation. You fear you might commit career suicide by actually nodding off during the PowerPoint.
It is no doubt a Canberra conundrum, especially in light of a new survey.
Polling organisation YouGov has found that one in five office workers in the ACT finds meetings "boring", "uninspiring" and "unproductive". Meanwhile, only 11 per cent of ACT office workers find meetings "fun".
The survey indicates most Canberran office workers attend two or more meetings a day. Only 3 per cent said their meetings were usually under 15 minutes long.
A full four out of five said they would like the meetings they attended to "be more engaging and interactive".
Canberra is an office city more than any other. According to the census, about two thirds of workers in the city are professional, clerical and administrative or managers - office workers, in other words. For Australia as a whole, it's less than half.
Canberra's office workers said the biggest cause of reduced productivity was "too many emails", followed by "being distracted by other staff and/or co-workers".
YouGov doesn't break down the ACT figures into public and private sector office workers, but they do for Australia as a whole.
The figures indicate workers in the public sector have a pretty miserable time at meetings compared with office workers in the private sector - only 3 per cent in the public sector described meetings as "fun", compared with 13 per cent in the private sector.
Public sector workers were much more likely to say that "having too great a workload" hampered their productivity. But the private sector seem to go to meetings more - a bigger proportion of them attend more than four meetings a day.
Despite this, public sector office workers are much more unhappy about the meetings they attend.
So what's to be done?
Canberra work consultancy firm Synergy, which mostly advises federal agencies, has one unique approach - it's turned a VW camper van into a mobile office - not a "bored room", it says.
Creative director Jason Perelson says the advantage of taking workers out of the office was that it enabled fresh thinking.
"Forcing ourselves out of our comfort zone is a way of building productivity," he says.
Productivity expert Donna McGeorge, who wrote The 25-Minute Meeting, tells The Canberra Times she thinks public sector meetings are longer than those in private firms.
"In the public sector, meetings can be 90 minutes to two hours long," she says.
She also has a simple solution - she advises meeting organisers to set deadlines. Just say how long the meeting will be, rather than let it drift with people arriving late.
"Just deciding we want them shorter is a great start," she says.
She's worked with managers throughout Australia and the Asia-Pacific for more than twenty years, including Nissan, Ford, Jetstar and Medibank.
She won't name names, but she says she got meetings at one employer down from 90 minutes to 25 minutes.
She has what she calls "news report meetings" - a quick fire approach where attendees are asked:
- "What are you working on?"
- "What's blocking progress?"
- "What do you need done to unblock progress?"
So, good advice?
Still awake?