Published cartoon ·
Principal Meeting Attendee
A full calendar is the deliverable.
Why this one bites
The attendee holds up a trophy for a full calendar while the results board records no decisions or actions. Every meeting is checked off; whether anything changed is a separate and apparently less urgent question.
The cartoon treats visibility as a substitute for accomplishment. Attendance creates a simple, reproducible record of busyness, while solving a problem requires a less convenient account of what happened. Follow-up meetings become the most reliably produced output, keeping tomorrow's calendar safely occupied too.
Accessible summary
- A smiling attendee raises a Full Calendar trophy beside a packed schedule. Other figures move between conference rooms, while a board shows zero decisions, zero actions and unknown outcomes.
- The daily metrics count meetings and hours but leave problems unresolved. The closing line calls a full calendar the easiest form of productivity to screenshot.
Reading notes
A full calendar measures demand on someone's time. It does not by itself measure what that demand produces. A meeting may settle a decision, transfer knowledge or coordinate work that could not sensibly happen in isolation. It may also exist because a previous meeting ended without a decision. Counting both as equivalent units of productivity rewards the visible occupation of time rather than the reason for occupying it.
The trophy makes this substitution explicit. Attendance is easy to prove with invitations and screenshots. Preventing confusion, removing a dependency or deciding not to pursue a bad idea requires a more thoughtful explanation. An organization that prefers the easy measure can unintentionally train people to protect their calendar density, even when fewer meetings would let everyone accomplish more.
The results board asks the missing questions: what was decided, who will act and what changed? A useful meeting does not need a dramatic outcome every time, but it should have a purpose beyond becoming evidence that everyone was involved. The follow-up invitation is the perfect comic product because it both records activity today and guarantees activity tomorrow. The attendee can maintain an immaculate performance record while the original problem patiently waits outside the conference room for someone with an empty half hour.