This depends what work you are doing. If you work in event planning, the work is mostly meetings to get everyone to do their role for the actual day.

Of course for a software engineer, it's different.

No, it doesn't make a difference what kind of work you are doing.

At some point your meetings have to result in some kind of action taken. The action is the work.

You can have 100 meetings planning an event but if you never actually have the event, have you actually done any work?

The work is actually booking the venue, finding the staff for the event, setting up the decor, inviting the guests, selling the tickets, hiring catering, scheduling the talks or speeches, any of the other stuff.

Work actually materializes something.

Meetings, at best, materialize a plan for how to do the work. Often they don't even do that.

Playing these semantic games was really fun when you're a stoned teenager or in college, but adults typically understand that work performed must be useful work.

There is:

A. An infinite amount of potential work to be done

B. Only some of this work "generates income" as you put it

C. There is a method of determining which work "generates income" and "needs to be performed"

Hope you can figure out the rest.

I'm confused by the tone of your post.

You sound like you are disparaging what I said as being "semantic games", but then you go on to agree with me with.

> C. There is a method of determining which work "generates income" and "needs to be performed"

To me this reads almost exactly with what I said:

"At best they are planning about how to do the work, or what the build with the work"

It seems we both agree there is a clear distinction between "The method of determining which work [to do]" and the work itself.

Glad we agree!

> It seems we both agree there is a clear distinction between "The method of determining which work [to do]" and the work itself.

There's a distinction, but one does not exist without the other. So it was a commentary on other posters in the thread arguing about which is more important.

So, all these people dont do work...

Accounting, HR, Marketing, etc

These are cost centers, they don't generate income.

Accounting filing taxes and managing payroll is "the work".

Accounting having meetings about which tax software to use this year is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"

HR making job listings and filtering candidates is "the work"

HR having meetings about how to navigate a change to remote hiring is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"

My point is that if you have the meeting but don't actually execute on anything, you haven't actually done any work.

And meetings that don't result in anything you can execute on are absolutely outside the realm of work altogether.

> The work is the stuff that actually generates income.

none of the above generates income, meetings or otherwise.

Phrasing it in terms of generating income was not the best choice of words, I'll admit.

However if you granted what I wrote even an ounce of charity, you could probably guess that I didn't mean "literally only the direct actions that generate income for the company are work"

My stance is not that complicated. Work is actions taken to advance the interests of the company. Meetings are talking about actions to take, but are not actions themselves. If the outcome of the meeting does not actions for someone to take, then it probably was not a useful meeting.