The biggest risk of attending a meeting isn’t losing precious work hours or being outed as a fraud; it’s walking away from the meeting with more work. You need to go into every meeting with a plan for how to avoid, or at least mitigate, additional assignments.
Without a concrete plan, you risk leaving the size of your workload to chance, and hope, as they say, is never a strategy, especially in the workplace where all hope goes to die.
Here are some tips:
- Constantly talk about how swamped you are.
- Try to look as flustered as possible.
- Be proactive about deflecting assignments.
