How to spend a lot of time at work, and do NOTHING

Why go to work and get stuff done, when you can go and be there a lot but do nothing?

In that vein, here's my general weekly schedule:

• Monday: two 2-hour meetings
  
• Tuesday: one 2-hour meeting, one 1.5-hour staff meeting
  
• Wednesday: 1 hour staff meeting, with two 2-hour meetings every other week
• Thursday: one 4-hour meeting, or one 5-hour meeting three out of the four weeks in a month
• Friday: one 2-hour meeting

So that's: 4, 3.5, 3, 3 and 2 hours each day (if you average) of meetings a week. For a total of 15.5 hours out of my 40 hour work week.

Add in daily schedule and action item review of 15 minutes/day, with 5 extra minutes on Monday's to preview the week, and 5 minutes on Friday to review. That's another 1.5 hours a week.

So now I'm up to 17 hours a week, or 42.5% of my week in meetings that I can't get out of, I've tried.

Then when I'm actually at my desk, the poor people who work for me are coming by to try and get snippets of "leadership" or update me on status. So let's just assume I spend 30 minutes a day on that. I'm up to 18.5 hours of "non-work".

Add in some bathroom breaks, random chit-chat, and a fleeting notion that I might not be 100% focused all the time, and I'm easily up to 20 hours/week.


How I combat this, in a follow-on post...