Requests for available meeting times. I figure if I drag my feet on scheduling a meeting someone urgently wants to have they'll eventually just email the fucking questions and save us both 90 minutes of pointless bullshit.
I actually made an online meeting request process with a minimum 2-week turnaround just to make scheduling meetings with my department annoying. I only have so much time, and if I honored all requests I'd be spending 60+ hours a week in meetings and none actually doing my job.
In a project manager. Meetings are my job. If I made my customers wait two weeks to schedule a meeting, I’d be fired. Two weeks to hold it? Maybe. Two weeks to schedule? No.
Could you perhaps cut down on the number of meetings you have? I've found that 99% of meetings I get invited to could usually have been an email or a slack message, but then people just want to waste time talking to make it look like they're doing stuff instead of actually just doing stuff.
2 weeks to hold is the minimum. But with the number of requests the reality is 6 weeks. Or just email the fucking questions and my team can get an answer back tomorrow.
I work in municipal government in a small city that's an enclave for the super-rich. We have with fewer than a dozen employees for the City with a population under 5000, but 100% of our citizens are millionaires (cheapest home that wasn't a year-down sold in the last 3 years was 4 million dollars). We have more billionaires in the city than municipal employees.
We actually have Ordinances regarding servant's quarters separate from those of guest houses (servant quarters have a smaller size limit).
All our meeting requests are from developers for entitled assholes who want to argue that the development Ordinances shouldn't apply to them.
Let's put it this way, in my first 2 months at this city I had more variance cases go to public hearings than in the rest of my career combined.
My last city had 20x the population, and maybe 1 lawsuit against the development office a year. Right now I'm involved in 8 court cases, and we've won every case that has gone to court. It's just that these billionaire assholes have infinite money and try to make themselves so burdensome we just give up and say "yes."
Our entire development staff was replaced because they were folding under that pressure. My job is to push back. Part of that is not letting their minions just walk in whenever they want demanding a meeting when they've already been given their answer and told to follow the rules, pound sand, or take it to Court where we will win.
I personally ignore emails with vague responses, especially if they treat email like a text message. Im not interested in instant communication via email.
For example:
"Can we meet?"
Should have answered the 5 Ws and name a time so the email is actionable. Otherwise I'll boomerang it and reply in a few days.
"Would you please send me that report we talked about? And also let me know which time period you would travel back to if you had a time machine and could only use it once?"
And also let me know which time period you would travel back to if you had a time machine and could only use it once?”
I mean, is there any valid answer aside from the '90s? '80s were cool but still too backwards, plus you still got the cool stuff from then in the later decade, anything before is "I don't want to die of a minor sickness" territory.
The 1920's to the 1970's are a no go just from the leaded gas use alone. Short BttF trip, sure, but I wouldn't want to live through that shit. If we think micro plastics is bad now, we use to put fast food in styrofoam up to the 80's.