When attending meetings that I should attend, I get bored because some people talk too much without putting action points or setting a plan of the next steps that should be done. I imagine it that they talk just for the sake of talking.
Sometimes they talk for 1 hour or more without setting any action points at the end. I am a junior developer and I have no control over the meeting. (I cannot tell them to stop doing this, and do something else.)
What do you advise me to do?
Bring a pad and write, write down anything.
It will keep you from looking like a zombie and if the person says something useful, you'll already have pen and paper in hand.
I have a hard time sitting still, so this works for me, I need to get that energy out of me. If you're restless as well, this may help.
What do you advice me to do?
Grin and bear it. Pay attention in spite of your boredom. Take notes.
Not everything can be within your control. Not everything can be exactly the way you'd prefer.
Remember this when you are eventually in the position where you can lead meetings. Create and follow a tight agenda. Make sure only those who need to be there are invited.
As Joe mentioned in the comments, smile and deal with it. You are a junior developer. Unless you are the guy organizing the meeting and everyone that is attending the meeting is inferior to you, you don't get to "do" anything about a boring meeting.
Although, I've found this one trick VERY helpful when I am bored in a meeting.
INVOLVE YOURSELF! Contribute. Say something relevant to the topic being discussed about. You are a junior developer. The guy boring you might be a veteran employee of the company, so you need to watch your tone and your body language when saying something.
If they are talking about something and a good "action point" (as you put it) comes across your mind, intervene as politely as possible and say:
I know I am new here, but I just wanted to see if I am following what you are saying. So when you say [boring boring stuff here], do you mean doing something like [joyous non-boring action point]?
This achieves two things:
Outside of that, there isn't really much you could do here. I hope this helps.
I am going to answer differently to existing answers.
I have no control over the meeting. (I cannot tell them to stop doing this, and do something else.)
I think as an employee you can find ways to exert some kind of influence. You might raise the issue with your line managers, talk with your colleagues, raise it on company all hands or off site meetings with the aim of reducing long/ineffective meetings. Most meetings are waste of time and excessively long the least.
As a last resort, you can look for another company where you can work efficiently, instead of wasting your time in meetings. This should in the long run and everything else being the same, lead you to a better career.
Well, there is no one solution for all situations.
Make all efforts to understand what they discuss about. You may get important information for life even from random "bla bla".
If you are not very pressed with work, tough deadlines etc. - just be nice and suffer :) Maybe they suffer also when you speak :)
If you are really pressed by time - ask politely if your presence is really needed in the meeting, explaining your situation - tough deadline (or whatever).
If you're able to:
Take a laptop
The official justification is the laptop is for taking notes (which it can do), but in reality you can continue productively doing work (or work related tasks, like replying to emails) whilst listening to what is being said in the meeting. Assuming the tasks are work related and don't disrupt the meeting, no-one will raise any eyebrows.
When I joined a department, they had meetings near daily which often involved discussions on processes I wasn't involved in. I simply took a laptop and continued working. Eventually everyone brought either a laptop or tablet which they would either work on or use to show or demonstrate something in the meeting.
I was able to suggest that such regular meetings were harming productivity, which eventually resulted in them being cut back, which improved productivity. Meetings are now ad-hoc when people have lots of information to share.
Spend the time studying the people. See who is most persuasive and why. Learn how they do what they do. Learn how not to be boring like some others.
Note down the relevant points made as well of course.
I can advocate the use of a simple NLP technique called rapport building - from personal experience I can tell you it works.
Example
Senior team member X is droning on (or maybe even making a lot of sense)
Listen carefully and formulate your own ideas
Do a rapport creating technique (see below)
Wait for X to turn to you and ask your opinion. It will happen, but make sure you have something to say even if it is just "I agree!"
The technique
The raw technique would be to mirror their movements, e.g. lean forward when they lean forward, etc. The problem is that this may be too obvious. The subtle technique is to mirror with a different motion. For example, have your hand resting on the table. When they lean forward, press your hand flat. When they straighten up, relax your hand. You can also mirror their breathing or speech pattern.
I can attest that this works. In any case it is a fun thing to do and will keep you happily occupied throughout the meeting.
There are two things that I would consider doing. I am no longer a junior developer, but these are things that I think everyone should be able to do. Whether these options are available to you in your workplace will depend greatly on what your work environment/colleagues are like.
Feedback
Most workplaces nowadays, in medium to large companies at least, encourage employees to give each other feedback in some way. There might be official infrastructure for doing so.
One route might be to try and leave feedback for the person/people who organise these meetings suggesting ways in which they could be more effective.
You have to be careful, though, that you leave constructive feedback, rather than being negative, especially since you are in a junior position. Try to be specific about issues, and offer suggestions of what might be done instead to improve the situation.
People should welcome feedback, as it gives them a chance to improve before the same things come up on an actual performance review of some kind.
Of course, it is also very easy to take constructive feedback as outright criticism, so tread carefully. Hopefully you work with professionals.
Opt out
Depending on the meeting, if it's something that really has no value for you, maybe you could just turn down the invite and not attend. This of course depends on the nature of the meeting.
Remember that you are getting paid for listening to it. Consider it something like a boring school class with a programmer salary. Do things you would do in a boring school class - doodle and write funny limericks. Just pay enough attention to keep up appearances. It's up to them superiors to spend the company time and money on this type of thing.
This article may help - 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings:
Try to think of a question to ask.
When I'm in a meeting where things start to seem less relevant to me, or stray into topics that I don't know much about, I find it helps me to think of a well-formulated, specific question that I could ask during the discussion, even if I never speak up. This helps me focus on the boundary between what I already understand or care about, and what I don't understand or care about.
The discussion is evidently important to someone in the room, so trying your best to make it relevant to yourself is a good way to make it more interesting. Even if you don't ask the question during the meeting, just the process of formulating it can help to focus on the topic at hand, and forces you to think more deeply about other aspects that haven't been touched upon in the discussion. If something doesn't seem relevant, try to find a connection to something that interests you.
As a bonus, if your manager ever spontaneously turns to you and asks your opinion on the subject at hand, you'll have something reasonably intelligent to say, rather than scrambling to hide your inattention!
You need to learn new skill: sleep on the meeting without anybody noticing.
You can wear black glasses and choose comfortable chair.
What is most difficult it's not fall from chair when you fall asleep.
You need to spend some time for this kind of training, but it's very useful skill.
You say you are a junior member. This probably means you don't have that much experience of different types of company.
A lot of people these days work in medium sized or large companies. These companies are not effective, in the sense that there is no meritocracy and many/most jobs are basically irrelevant. Over the last several decades, real production has either been automated or given to Asian manufacturing as part of a process of Western de-industrialization.
As a newcomer to this context it might surprise you to discover that the majority of well paid staff are adept at doing as little as possible.
Meetings are a strange symptom of this context. You will find that people often work overtime on seemingly useless tasks, such as clearing email backlogs, producing reports or adding things to Excel sheets. This overtime is not because the company needs anyone to do these tasks, but because the majority of people are in a constant struggle trying to make a show and justify their income at all. It becomes a race to the bottom for peer approval.
In a small, highly focused startup, or a creative art studio or some other well-motivated team, you will find the opposite. There is such an abundance of work that getting effective meetings and communication to happen at all can be a problem.
The fact that you have to endure rambling pointless meetings most likely indicates you are not in that latter context.
Essentially your choice is to go find a better company/work environment, or play the game. That game being: encourage the babble, call for follow-up meetings, emphasise the 'importance' of the subject matter being discussed, and in general do anything to fulfill the illusion that this drab workplace existence is in anyway fruitful beyond the paycheck that clears the corporate debt-slave's monthly obligation. If you have any self-respect and if you are free of debt, I suggest you elevate yourself out of that quagmire as soon as you can.
We have a lot of meetings - but being a large and dispersed company they're often online. The best meetings are voice calls through Google Hangouts. You can fire up a webcam if you like, but it's very rare. Webex is okay too. The worst meetings are full-on video conference calls between meeting rooms.
The point of being at your computer with a headset rather than in a meeting room is that you can get on with other things while the meeting drones on. You still have to pay attention in case your name is mentioned - (it's an acquired skill).
So - if you can get the meeting changed to an on-line one then you're still more productive than struggling to stay awake in a meeting room.
This really depends upon the context of the meeting but - if your involvement is required, it may be because acting upon the information provided at the meeting is part of your job.
As several answers have already mentioned - you should bring a notepad and pen to take notes during this meeting - and when you hear someone describing something that needs action, write down what you think the action should be, so that you'll be able to remember it later.
Depending on your position, this may also be a mandatory 1-hour meeting for the whole office, in which case there will definitely be some information relayed that is not relevant to you or your job - you might be bored while this is going on, but do your best to grin and bear it, as others have pointed out.
And get used to keeping your ears open for anything that might affect you in the future - if you work in the same office as these people, eventually you may need to actually listen to what they have to say, no matter how long-winded they are.
While you already have plenty of good answers, one of things that also help is drinking.
If you're allowed to take drinks with you, take either tea or water (I prefer having a 0,5l bottle of water). Whenever you start feeling sleepy, take a small sip. It will wake you up a bit. I'm not sure why it works but I have some guesses. One thing is that it allows you to do some movement. It also works as a kind of distractor from the boring stuff so for a moment you are doing something genuinely different, making it easier to get back to boring stuff.
The drawback isif the meeting is longer than 1-1,5h hour you'll need a bathroom.
I agree with the other answers and obviously, you are only a junior member of the team, so you need to accept some things until you have more experience to provide some feedback.
Having said that and also been at your position before, I would like to point you to some of Elon Musk's quotes about productivity: "Elon Musk: Just walk out of bad meetings"
If you want to follow his advice, you need to keep three things from the article above:
I know this is not always possible at each company and especially when you are only a junior member of the team. However, I felt like this complementary answer is needed, so that it could help someone trying to have an objective
This sounds like a not very stimulating environment.
I think you should try and get out of there and get to a place that values people actually working instead of sitting in meetings all day. There do exist such places.
There are many good suggestions, but one that can help your career in the company and also potentially shorten the "bla bla" is to ask a question of the person speaking that will help them direct their talk toward a meaningful goal.
The goal is, if you think you can see possibly where someone is going with a long speech, to ask a question that will make it easier for them to answer with an action point.
You might ask, "Pardon me, I want to make sure I'm following. Do you mean X, or something else?" Hopefully the X you provide is a short and accurate guess at an action point. If your guess is correct, then you've helped them nail something down. Plus you also look very good (internal career value). If your guess is wrong, it may help them redirect their focus toward something useful, or it may help them realize they are meandering. And it may help you stay engaged and interested, lessening the boredom.
Talk to your manager. Explain that you don't understand the purpose of your presence in these meetings and that you would rather be working on things to make your company more money.
Either your manager will explain to you the reason for the meetings, or he will tell you to suck it up and deal with it because he has no control over it, or he will figure out a way to get you excused. Just make sure that if he does achieve the latter, that you do actually use the time productively!
