I totally agree! I hate being stuck in a meeting and thinking, "If I could hit Google right now, we'd have this answered already."

Luckily, this company doesn't have many meetings, so it isn't a big deal.

I sort-of agree that meetings are often a waste of time BUT if you have to google something _during_ the meeting, you haven't prepared sufficiently or the meeting organizer hasn't provided a clear agenda before the meeting.

Meetings can be valuable if people take them seriously (and if there aren't too many).

Lots of times, unforeseen questions come up at meetings, in fact, if they don't; that's a sign the meeting wasn't really productive at all. Google should be on a large screen in the conference room. Or Bing if you're into that. Most meetings I get invited to end up with "action item" which means really, people go back to your desks and Google, research, test, decide, etc. so we can have a followup meeting to decide what we could have decided together in the first meeting if we didn't shut ourselves into a conference room, away from the world on the pretense that the meeting will be 100% productive that way.

Lots of problems come up in meetings that you can't adequately prepare for.

Clear agendas don't solve the problem of a bad agenda.

Meetings can be valuable but not nearly as valuable as peer to peer communication in the office. Meetings are almost always a waste of time where I work.

> I can't tell you how many times being able to look something up to respond in a more concrete way has solved countless meetings. reply

But when the questions and comments are not well expressed keeping the loop in text (email or Slack) makes the things worse. Obviously if you can just fire a voice conference everything can be sorted out but in my, just personal, experience remote workers are working more asynchronously and you don't expect to talk immediately without scheduling it earlier, much earlier than on-site where it is spontaneous.

Having to take the time to write them down in a clear manner is a major benefit of text media (e-mail).

Half of the time, you end up not sending the e-mail because you found the answer while organising your question.

It's almost as if different modes of communication are appropriate for different kinds of problems! Who would have thought?