How to Survive a Pointless Work Meeting With Style

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You open your calendar, see the invite, and immediately question your life choices. The title? Something like “Quick Sync” or “Collaborative Touch Base.” The agenda? Non-existent. The purpose? Unclear. The attendees? A smorgasbord of people who haven’t emailed you in weeks but are suddenly united in this 60-minute exercise in mutual time theft. Congratulations. You’ve been invited to a meeting that could’ve been a gif.

Let’s start with the emotional prep. Lower your expectations. No, lower. This is not going to be a productive brainstorm or a decisive moment in your career. This is a theatre production loosely themed around productivity. Put on your neutral face, prepare some nods, and remember: you’re not here to solve anything—you’re here to survive.

Step one: dress the part. If you’re on camera, opt for the classic business-on-top, pyjamas-below combo. It’s the official uniform of meetings-that-don’t-matter. Bonus points for a mug of something hot and ambiguous—it suggests you’re thoughtful and caffeinated. Even if it’s just soup.

Step two: the open-tab technique. Always keep something useful open—a spreadsheet, a project brief, literally anything that looks mildly strategic. Should someone screen share or ask for feedback, you can quickly alt-tab your way into relevance. Think of it as digital camouflage.

Step three: the “I agree” strategy. When in doubt, back up a previous speaker with phrases like “Yes, I was just thinking that,” or “Great point, I’d love to build on that.” You don’t actually have to build on it. The key is sounding engaged without committing to anything measurable. Master this, and you’re golden.

If the meeting is hybrid or in-person, your best weapon is placement. Sit near the door. If you sense it’s spiralling into chaos (e.g., someone brings up AI with no plan, or a slideshow appears with more than five bullet points per slide), you’ll need an escape route. Claim another meeting or a bathroom break—both classics.

When someone inevitably says, “Let’s circle back on this,” translate it in your head as, “Let’s never speak of this again.” And when someone insists on “going around the room,” prepare a vague but enthusiastic update like: “Still aligning across teams but making progress.” No one knows what that means, but it sounds like you’re doing something.

South Africans know this dance all too well. From corporate boardrooms to startup Slack calls, we’ve all been trapped in meetings where nothing moves but the clock. Add load shedding, dodgy Wi-Fi, and 10-minute monologues on budget alignment, and you’ve got yourself an Olympic-level patience test.

The truth is, not all meetings are bad. But the bad ones are spectacularly pointless. And while you can’t always avoid them, you can learn to survive them with your sanity intact. So next time you’re in a meeting that feels like a waste of bandwidth, remember: you’re not alone. You’re part of a global community of people nodding, typing nothing, and secretly wondering what’s for lunch.