Meeting Doodles
The thing about meetings is that no matter how hard you try, your mind wanders. Not all the time, and not for the same reasons every time.
For several years I worked at Microsoft, where meetings can be as stultifying as they are numerous. There are many ways to deal with the inevitable boredom that grips you when you're in an endless, pointless meeting. Some people send emails from their cell phones, others surf the web on their laptops, and a few actually sleep. I doodled to pass the time, and I'm sure I wasn't alone...
Paradoxically, the very activity I turned to as a way of staunching the soul bleeding ended up having the opposite effect. It seemed I remembered much more of what happened in any given meeting when I doodled than when I did not. Recent studies have since confirmed this phenomenon. There's even a book devoted to the subject.
Enjoy this sample from many years at many jobs.
-John Kieltyka