Ever since I first became a Hotel & Restaurant Inspector for the AA Hotel & Restaurant Guide, almost 20 years ago, to paraphrase the well known Boomtown Rats song from the 70s, I have hated Mondays. My principle reason for my intense dislike of the first day of the working week, is that so many businesses, having got the weekend over and done with, choose to close on a Monday.
It is virtually impossible, in our so called 24/7 society, to find a restaurant open, a pub that is serving food, to feed my groaning stomach, or a hairdresser or beautician to help me make my appearance look a little better. It seems to me that many small businesses, the type I prefer to shop in, all shut up shop, treating Monday as a ‘non-day’. Admittedly I am hardly a good example of work/life balance, but it is frustrating in the extreme nonetheless when I want to go about my business, and spend my hard earned money in their establishments.
However, gripe over, the real reason that I hate Mondays is that so many organisations have their meetings on a Monday, and frequently all at the same time. With the best will in the world I just cannot be in several different places at once; a classic example of not being able to please all of the people all of the time, despite my constant juggling act to ensure that no-one feels neglected. This often results in me making half of a meeting before dashing off to another one, and in the process completing missing a third if I’m not careful. This last Monday is a case in point. I try to arrange my working life to keep Mondays clear for meetings but I still ended up attending eight in all, going from home to Exeter, to Yeovil, to Taunton to Ilminster, all at a rate of knots. There is of course the argument about being over committed. I do my best before saying ‘yes’ to joining yet another committee, to find out what the time commitment will be. The response is usually ‘Oh, we only meet four times a year...’; that is until sod’s law dictates that each organisation will develop some previously unheard of issue or problem, that involves, yes, more meetings. Perhaps this is one of the reasons, that on the surface at least, when councillors’ expenses are published each year mine seem reassuringly high, but not without having undergone the utmost scrutiny by the office bods responsible for protecting the public purse. I know there are those who choose not to claim at all, but in spending over £100 a week on petrol that is not a luxury I can afford.
There does appear to be a good deal of focus on whether or not one attends meetings, but I would argue that it is more about the quality of the meeting, not how many you hold.
I was truly delighted when described publicly during my tenure as Chair of Somerset Schools’ Forum as being a ‘magnificent chair’, one of the highest compliments I’ve ever been paid. I like to do things well, and in preparation for such an exalted position I had taken formal training to give me a fighting chance of doing a good job. Chairing meetings is a skill, and I’m sad to say that not all committee chairmen have quite mastered the art; to maintain focus, having a tight agenda and sticking to it, whilst allowing those present the opportunity to have their say. For me, more important than the meeting itself, are the outcomes, the decisions taken and the resulting actions, within agreed timescales. I attend numerous meetings where the same items have in some cases been on the agenda for a VERY long time, seemingly without resolution. I fall foul of this on occasion, where I have neither the power nor the responsibility to carry out the task in hand, and were it not for the repercussions, there are many occasions when I’ve felt like taking action myself in an effort to evade the slow wheels of democracy, and its resulting bureaucracy, at work.
I admit that I have now become much more selective about which meetings to attend. If it is a choice between spending my time debating issues with a bunch of other councillors about things that will have little or no impact on the community I represent, or spending time in the community, with the opportunity to really engage with people on a meaningful level, then I always choose the latter.
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