Being self-employed and working at home have many benefits. First, being self-employed means that every meeting I have to attend (except for initial client meetings), I get paid to be there even if nothing gets accomplished or I don’t say anything. So you’d expect people to sparingly invite me to meetings. Second, working from home means that most of my meetings are on the phone; good thing there is a mute button so I can be working on something else.
I’m not sure why people like meetings so much, but when I worked for a rather large company, there were days where I’d have 3 or 4 one hour long meetings. So half my day was shot in meetings. Did anything really come out of the meetings? I don’t recall. It seems that many meetings could be eliminated in business if people were more efficient at using email and were more concise. For me, if something goes into a long explanation of something, I usually get it in the first few words, so the rest of the words is wasted on me.
Do people feel important setting up a meeting? Does it make people feel like they’re working? I’m not sure about others, but I absolutely hate meetings and do what I can to avoid them.