Willy Trolove: Let's meet to discuss how we can plan our next meeting

If you are employed, it's a good bet that you spend great chunks of your life in meetings. This is normal. For some reason, meetings are an essential part of doing your job.

In fact, judging by the number of people who are "in a meeting at the moment" whenever you try to get hold of them, the proportion of the nation's workforce actually engaged in real work must be tiny.

This is largely because the phrase "we need to have a meeting about this" has become the standard response to any problem that requires initiative or original thought.

In my experience, most people in meetings either don't know why they are there or would be more useful to humanity if they weren't. This is because the wrong people tend to be invited to meetings.

Attending meetings is not so much about getting something done. It is more about establishing and defending your position in the workplace hierarchy.

People spend their whole working lives yearning to be invited to important meetings. If you attend meetings on finance or corporate strategy, you are obviously more important than the people attending meetings on, say, the build-up of used coffee cups in the kitchenette. And if you are important enough to attend the important meetings, you don't have to attend the unimportant ones.

Chief among unimportant meetings is the team meeting. Team meetings involve the members of a department or business unit getting together to discuss the great issues that unite them all, such as the poor lighting over the snack machine.

Team meetings occur weekly, fortnightly or monthly, depending on how often the manager thinks the team needs to know about the exciting new management thoughts he or she has been having. These thoughts tend to come from a book the manager is reading. They are exciting and new only to the manager.

Team meetings allow the manager to thwart pay-rise ambitions by drawing attention to the failures and inadequacies of any team members who are more competent than the manager.

When there is no pay-rise thwarting to be done, team members are sometimes bullied into giving short presentations about their jobs. This is so the manager can try to figure out what they actually do.

Project meetings are more important than team meetings. They are designed to divert a project from the natural path of smooth implementation that it would follow if it wasn't for project meetings.

Like team meetings, project meetings occur at regular intervals, except when they are called special project meetings. Special project meetings are held whenever a project member has made a mistake and wants to share the blame with everyone.

Management meetings are the most important meetings of all. They allow managers to get together and brag about how they have thwarted their team's pay-rise ambitions, and thus calculate how big their annual bonuses will be. Management meetings also allow managers to plan "management workshops", which is another way of saying golfing holidays.

All meetings are run by a chair. By chair, I mean the person running the meeting and not the piece of furniture being sat on by the person running the meeting. The piece of furniture being sat on is sometimes called the company accountant.

If you find yourself in a meeting, it is essential that you concentrate on becoming the chair. Chairs get to allocate the hard work to everyone else in the meeting, while leaving their own workload light, ill-defined, and without any actual deadlines that would distract them from spending quality time alone with their personal assistant.

In the old days the chair was called the chairman. Eventually it was realised that this is sexist because sometimes the chairman is a woman, or spends time after work dressed up as one.

To improve the efficiency of meetings, some organisations hire meeting consultants. This is only done after a series of meetings.

The first meeting is held to try to identify why meetings are not very efficient; the second meeting, to figure out ways to improve them; the third, to shortlist the best options; the fourth, to recommend hiring a meeting consultant; the fifth, to approve a budget for the meeting consultant; and the sixth, because the tea and biscuits have already been ordered and it would be a pity to waste them.

Inevitably, the meeting consultant suggests the best way to improve meeting efficiency is to hold more meetings.

Author's note: This column contains several unfair generalisations about meetings. Before all you managers and meeting consultants write in and complain about this, please be aware that I propose to correct these generalisations at some point in the near future.

Provided, of course, that I'm not in a meeting.