Meetings are not the work.
At best they are planning about how to do the work, or what the build with the work.
The work is the stuff that actually generates income.
At best they are planning about how to do the work, or what the build with the work.
The work is the stuff that actually generates income.
Of course for a software engineer, it's different.
At some point your meetings have to result in some kind of action taken. The action is the work.
You can have 100 meetings planning an event but if you never actually have the event, have you actually done any work?
The work is actually booking the venue, finding the staff for the event, setting up the decor, inviting the guests, selling the tickets, hiring catering, scheduling the talks or speeches, any of the other stuff.
Work actually materializes something.
Meetings, at best, materialize a plan for how to do the work. Often they don't even do that.
There is:
A. An infinite amount of potential work to be done
B. Only some of this work "generates income" as you put it
C. There is a method of determining which work "generates income" and "needs to be performed"
Hope you can figure out the rest.
You sound like you are disparaging what I said as being "semantic games", but then you go on to agree with me with.
> C. There is a method of determining which work "generates income" and "needs to be performed"
To me this reads almost exactly with what I said:
"At best they are planning about how to do the work, or what the build with the work"
It seems we both agree there is a clear distinction between "The method of determining which work [to do]" and the work itself.
Glad we agree!
There's a distinction, but one does not exist without the other. So it was a commentary on other posters in the thread arguing about which is more important.
Accounting, HR, Marketing, etc
These are cost centers, they don't generate income.
Accounting having meetings about which tax software to use this year is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"
HR making job listings and filtering candidates is "the work"
HR having meetings about how to navigate a change to remote hiring is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"
My point is that if you have the meeting but don't actually execute on anything, you haven't actually done any work.
And meetings that don't result in anything you can execute on are absolutely outside the realm of work altogether.
none of the above generates income, meetings or otherwise.
However if you granted what I wrote even an ounce of charity, you could probably guess that I didn't mean "literally only the direct actions that generate income for the company are work"
My stance is not that complicated. Work is actions taken to advance the interests of the company. Meetings are talking about actions to take, but are not actions themselves. If the outcome of the meeting does not actions for someone to take, then it probably was not a useful meeting.