How to Stretch a 10-Minute Meeting Into a Soul-Crushing Marathon
Dear Uncle Bobby - My team meetings are starting to get shorter — some of them are even ending early. Honestly, it’s throwing off my whole routine. I used to count on these painfully long marathons to avoid doing actual work. Any advice on how to stretch a simple 10-minute meeting into a multi-hour ordeal again?
Running Out the Clock with Style,
Cock-Watcher in Crisi
Oh, bless your productivity-averse little heart. A short meeting? That’s not efficiency — that’s cowardice. Real professionals know the true engine of corporate America isn’t innovation or teamwork… it’s meetings so long you start questioning your will to live.
If you want to bring that magic back, sit down and take notes — ironically, the only time you should ever take notes in a meeting.
First, always open with a story. Preferably unrelated. Ideally 17 minutes long. Maybe something about your dog, your neighbor’s cat, or that time you almost bought a kayak. Doesn’t matter. The goal is to disorient everyone immediately.
Then — and this is important — ask clarifying questions. Not good clarifying questions. Useless ones.
“Can we define what ‘soon’ means?”
“Is anyone else feeling a weird vibe today?”
“Before we move on, can someone recap the last 40 minutes even though we’ve only been here for 12?”
Next, master the art of the cascading tangent. Bring up one irrelevant point, which leads to another, which leads to a third that is now a full-blown philosophical argument about whether the snack budget should include gluten-free options for a guy who left the company in 2021.
And don’t overlook the power of screensharing. Nothing extends a meeting faster than watching someone scroll through their desktop like they’re searching for the Ark of the Covenant. Bonus points if they open the wrong file and say, “Huh… that’s weird.”
If things start wrapping up too quickly, pull out the nuclear option:
“So before we adjourn… what does everyone think about revisiting our mission statement?”
Congratulations. You’ve just added 90 minutes.
Look, short meetings may boost morale, but long, pointless ones? Those build character. They forge the unspoken bond of shared suffering. They’re the closest thing corporate life gets to a tribal rite of passage.
So go forth. Waste time proudly. Keep the flame of inefficiency burning bright.