The sensible answer here would seem to be for office workers using MS products to go down to a three-day week (from home) (with no cut in pay) and let AI bots attend the meetings and deal with all the emails.

Or is that too obvious?

Sure, if the AI bots were up to the task. But this is Microsoft we're talking about, and I greatly fear their anticipated solution is going to be some variation of artificially intelligent Clippy. "It looks like you're trying to avoid a meeting. Would you like help?"

Just cut two more days. And the third day also when the AIs are allowed to answer and generate both internal and external mails.

Since most emails are from mindless bots anyway, the meat'y or the mechanically, no difference there, we should have a perfect AI storm of emails through the pipes and manglement will get perfect statistics of how active we all are, based on the email flow.

Nothing, ever, can possibly go wrong again.

The problem is it's not 3 days of productive work all at once and a day either side of chatting. It's 5 days being available with bits of work squeezed in when you have to. Companies need to ask themselves if they expect to deal with this discrepancy one way, by aiming for contiguous days of non-stop productivity, or are they going to be sensible?

Who exactly are you kidding? Of course they are not going to do anything that might removed even $1.00 from the bottom line

And of course every time that productive work is interrupted by a meeting or for a call, it requires 10-20 minutes to get back in focus for productive work. So having 16 hours per week of meetings and emailing split up into, say, 32 half-hour chunks, means up to another 8 hours which at best are of minimal productivity and at worst completely unproductive.

In practice for optimal productivity, it's probably worth it for companies to have blanket bans on meetings for large chunks of time (eg 1000-1500) and/or on specific days. It's ironic that it's in the best interest of the company for managers to make sure that employees are attending only strictly necessary meetings, that employees would be only too happy with that, but usually it's the managers themselves gumming up the productivity wheels by insisting on unnecessary meeting participation.

I think anyone in a corporate job will tell you “No sh**, Sherlock!”

As much as I detest Google and Elmo, both have one thing right: meetings take too much time, so unless there’s an agenda, try to wiggle out of them (or supply an agenda of your own to prompt the meeting convener to provide one). I don’t mind a well-structured meeting if it actually achieves something definitive and constructive, but personally I just call them in the most extreme of needs. If I send someone a message over a chat system, I don’t expect immediate responses, ditto for email, but when I do need an immediate response I’ll do both. It’s rare I do.

Email is the bane of people’s lives, although as any fool no, it’s good as a tool to CYA. Microsoft’s not helping that part…

Status meetings where everyone in the company reviews their progress on their project to people on every other project who have no idea about the context.

So 35 people on 5 different projects describing details to the other 34 who don't know, care or understand.

And the company thinks this 90mim snooze is an agile standup.

It's like you work in my company. You probably do, blink twice if you need help. I won't be able to help you, I'll just blink back.

As an eminent wealthy producer of "their workplace software productivity raises our profits" tools

I'm having a kip. Zzzzzzzz

Usual case of the people selling you the problem conveniently also being the ones to sell you the "solution".

The problem here isn't the tools, it's the company culture. I worked in a place where visibility was a key part of getting on. As a result, people copied in the boss (and many others) on every work-related email they sent because they thought it kept them visible. I took over a project as PM and I was getting copied in on almost every email sent by everyone on the team - including the reply-all responses. I got them together and told them that I didn't want to see everything they did and that they'd be appraised on deliveries, not the number of emails sent, that we had other methods of working out if we were on track or not and if they needed my help then they should get off their backsides and come and talk to me. It took a while and a few interesting conversations along the lines of "...but I copied you in so I assumed that you'd....." but eventually my inbox got down to a manageable size.

I never cracked meetings, though. The culture was weird - almost as if the bosses were actors seeking the limelight and opportunties to showboat in front of their staff. The best I got was to dial in to a many of them (my team was in a satellite office few hundred yards from the main site) so I could stay on mute and get some work done while "listening" to stuff I didn't need to pay attention to.

Yep, I've been working in companies with the same culture, and most likely so have a very large number of Register readers. It sucks.

Happily in my current company meetings are kept to a minimum, regularly scheduled placeholder meetings are cancelled beforehand if there is nothing to discuss, and every Thursday is a 'focus' day where the only meeting is the daily standup first thing in the morning and the rest of the day is blissfully undisturbed. That and the flexibility about times worked and WFH policy is worth a huge amount to me

The report is hopefully subtitled "Will AI Fix Work?" - Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.

The statistics presented, that more time is spent communicating than creating, imply that communicating is less valuable. This is patently not true - how productive are a million monkeys with typewriters?

Why would you want to fix Al? What has Alfred done to you?

Nothing to do with the software or the tools, because meetings and emails and things like that are the metrics by which middle management justifies its existence everywhere in the world.

After many years in the world of work, offices and many many hours of meetings one of the most important phrases is "Could have been an email" and people don't say it enough. As an analyst I've lost count of the numbers of hours I've spent in meetings with sales people, directors, project managers (who really should know better) when they ask for something stupid or impossible.

There is this thinking in the office that if you get someone in a meeting you can change someone's mind and get them to perform a miracle. Example in point. I once had a two hour meeting for something we provided. We knew when we could provide it and when someone became eligible from the last time they had it. Great, the data is all there and it's pretty easy to. Are they still eligible and what's the date?

Where could this go wrong? Well I first offered it by month split by type of thing they are eligible for. Makes sense 12 columns. I thought to myself a little bit of work pulling and collating the data because their was that much but doable in half a day tops. Even when moving the Sundays over to Monday. No that's wasn't good enough this idiot manager in sales wanted it by day so I said no. It's going to be useless for anything. He kept on demanding then the obligatory meeting with my manger and a few other people involved as well. No matter how many times I explained to him he was going to end up with over 300 columns and it would be completely useless and unreadable. You also have to take into account the thing they were eligible for was never taken the day they became eligible. We would contact and offer it to them. He didn't actually manage that part of it so it wasn't a resource thing and besides as I explained to him you might have 300 one week and 50 the next however 200 from the first week could roll over into the next and yes I did have an average day to book which I ran for the team actually doing it which got me as close I could get to guessing resource needed.

After countless wastes hours of emails we go through the two hour meeting of me explaining why it's a waste of time and why it is absolutely useless data. He could even tell me what he wanted it for because obviously I tried that route to work back to what he actually needs it for but he couldn't tell me. At the end of the two hours even though the meeting was still going on my boss got me out of it saying I had important work to do because he could see I was less than a minute away from calling this guy a fucking idiot.

That is the problem with productivity and it's more common at multi-national companies. Companies allow complete and utter fucking idiots to run amok. Everyone will sit in these meeting and say nothing if it's pointless, they say nothing if the proposition is pointless and they do nothing if the idiot that scheduled it is pointless. The absolute worst thing is that no one says "It could have been an email" or "Why am I in this meeting?" or "What has this got to do with me?". People just sit through them and switch off.

If they want to fix this in software it's easy. Take away the ability to schedule meetings without the following. A proper title, a full description of what is being discussed and what you want from the meeting. Make it so you can't invite people without adding a reason why you're asking them to join. Add the forcing of a reply to the meeting request with a proposal which you are going to put forward in the meeting anyway. Individuals can also say why they don't need to attend the meeting. Then whoever is scheduling can then decide if they want it go ahead and if you really need to be there. Also change teams so before you can just call someone you have to put it in the chat of what you actually want. I've lost count the amount of times I've been in the middle of a big job and someone calls me about something really urgent that I need to do right away. Don't let it get urgent and don't rely on disturbing other people because you didn't get round to it.

There you go I've just saved an absolute huge amount of wasted time in the office.

"If they want to fix this in software it's easy. Take away the ability to schedule meetings without the following. A proper title, a full description...."

Fantastic idea, but how to implement??? The most you could really do in current software is enforce something to be written in each of the title field, description field, reason to join field etc. Idiot managers would very quickly start dropping useless "seemingly meaningful but actually meaningless" placeholders in these fields, and the software can't tell if a title is 'proper', a 'description is 'full', etc.

Although I guess you could upgrade the software to the "AI" version to verify all of that!!!!

The most productive projects I've been on were either before e-mail was a 'thing' or when it was unnecessary because related subsets of team members had clustered their desks, making both e-mail and/or phone calls unnecessary because two or three of the group could just talk quietly without disturbing people in the rest of the office.

The only exception I can remember was one case when a small group of us were in the code & test phase of the project: our desks were clustered, but we used e-mail between ourselves because this way messages could be attended to between writing blocks of code, debugging sessions, etc. Experience had shown us that in this particular case we got more done if answering questions etc could be deferred until the recipient's current task reached a natural breakpoint: e-mail provided the perfect way of collecting this type of query so they could be answered without breaking anybody's concentration.

Project meetings were kept brief and relatively infrequent too.

At a 'team meeting' event held by our Director, I did try to avoid him, for fear of, umm 'embarrassing myself'. Well, at the the end he was waiting by the door saying goodbye to each person, so I couldn't. He asked me how I was doing, and, I admit that I told him. I was on 5 active projects at the time (covering one for a colleague on sick leave), and told him that we all knew he was building his management team but that he didn't actually need to send an email to everyone each time he'd done something. After all, if I get an email from the Director, I feel I have to stop work and read it. So if he could just do a weekly or fortnightly update that would be less disruptive.

He did seem a bit hesitant, but after that we got a weekly 'newsletter' rather than sporadic 'what I have just done' emails, which did help a bit with workflow. Oh and my 'career' had already been 'limited' so no harm done, probably.

Will I be able to have my AI agent attend my weekly status meeting instead of myself?

No?

Waste of time.