Meetings, meetings, meetings

I used to take every Monday morning and work from home. This way I could get through all the stuff in my inbox uninterrupted and actually find some time to think about issues and resolutions instead of shoving the papers around from one corner to another on my desk. For the past 4 weeks my Mondays have been stolen by an endless bunch of meetings. Don't get me wrong, we need to have them to make sure we are all on the same page but they exhaust me and take away the time I was using to keep myself organized and sane. It feels like lately we are having so many meetings that there is no time to get the actual work done that is planned in the meetings. This gives me a headache most of the time. I am a great delegator but it still takes time to sift through it and figure out who to delegate it to and what information you have to give them to get it done right. I should be at the office now trying to get caught up.

The other thing that is so draining in these meetings is people's lack of respect for each other. I think Dilbert captures it frequently in some of the cartoon strips but not exactly. There's generally this undercurrent of some level of contempt for people in the various departments. I include myself in this observation. While I try to be respectful and understand people's perspectives after a while I just get irritated. I am somebody who needs to have communications be sparse/meaningful - get to the point fast and I am your fan for life - drone on and on and I will stop listening to you or interrupt and tell you to get to the point. How do I temper this impatience when I have to attend several meetings in one day. By the time I get to the third meeting I am already aggitated and the internal "bitch" is just waiting for an opportunity to pounce. I have worked on this really hard for the last 5 years with a coach. I had gotten a lot better but this was before all these meetings. Maybe I just have to draw a line in the sand and say that I won't attend more than two meetings in a day. I wonder if that would really work in the real world. If I were the CEO it would but I am not. Besides, I scheduled a bunch of these meetings anyway because we were communicating well. Does this sound nuts? Maybe that's because it is.