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I sort-of agree that meetings are often a waste of time BUT if you have to google something _during_ the meeting, you haven't prepared sufficiently or the meeting organizer hasn't provided a clear agenda before the meeting.

Meetings can be valuable if people take them seriously (and if there aren't too many).

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Lots of times, unforeseen questions come up at meetings, in fact, if they don't; that's a sign the meeting wasn't really productive at all. Google should be on a large screen in the conference room. Or Bing if you're into that. Most meetings I get invited to end up with "action item" which means really, people go back to your desks and Google, research, test, decide, etc. so we can have a followup meeting to decide what we could have decided together in the first meeting if we didn't shut ourselves into a conference room, away from the world on the pretense that the meeting will be 100% productive that way.

Lots of problems come up in meetings that you can't adequately prepare for.

Clear agendas don't solve the problem of a bad agenda.

Meetings can be valuable but not nearly as valuable as peer to peer communication in the office. Meetings are almost always a waste of time where I work.

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