Popular Science has a nice round-up of ten different studies where science confirms the obvious (with a bonus page about science disproving a few bits of conventional wisdom).
The ten conclusions are:
- Combining Drugs and Alcohol is Bad For You
- Gun-Toting Drivers are More Prone to Road Rage
- Faraway Objects Are Tougher to See
- The Beer-Goggle Effect is a Bona Fide Phenomenon
(we covered this one a while back) - Swallowing More Than One Magnet is Dangerous
- Smoking Cigarettes Costs You Money
- Memory and Concentration Fade With Age
- Women Like Funny Men
- Time Flies When You’re Busy
And the final conclusion they cover?
Too Many Meetings Make You Grumpy
The Study: “The relationship between meeting load and . . . well-being of employees,” Group Dynamics, March 2005
The Findings: Ever get the feeling that you’d get more work done if you weren’t constantly attending meetings to discuss all the work to be done? Two social scientists from the universities of Minnesota and North Carolina hypothesized that meetings are analogous to “hassles,” defined in stress-research literature as “annoying episodes in which daily tasks become more difficult or demanding than anticipated.” The psychologists analyzed diary entries from 37 meeting-prone midlevel university workers over one week. They found that days chock-full of meetings left employees feeling stressed, exhausted and burned out.
Why Bother? Employers take heed: Since beleaguered workers may perform poorly, be tardy, or quit, the authors suggest that “organizations be sensitive to the number of meetings employees are required to attend.” Managers could create “formal guidelines” for meeting necessity (presumably not drafted at a meeting).
And, just to complete the picture for you, allow me to show you my schedule from a sample day this week:
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