Challenging to listen to someone talk for long periods

I have many meetings at work, and I find after about 15 to 20 minutes it starts to get hard. My eyes start even getting blurry, and I struggle to understand. I frown and look so serious from the concentration it takes me to follow what is being said and end with a headache. That's even with hanging on to fidget toy.

PhoenixEddy said:

I have many meetings at work, and I find after about 15 to 20 minutes it starts to get hard

Have you considered using AI to take notes for you that you can refer back to later? There is a good list of various services that do that here: 

https://clickup.com/blog/ai-tools-for-meeting-notes/

This way you can teach yourself to defocus on the parts that are not direclty relevant to you and skim over these at the time but bring your focus back where it is needed.

I used to be really blunt in meetings that were becoming irrelevant or boring  and say "look do you really need me here - I don't feel I am able to contribute and I have a lot to do - can I leave please?" and that tended to be a reminder that they were wasting peoples time.

It didn't blow back on me as I was trying to be productive rather than waffle away self importantly in the meeting.

Where I had to wait for a part where I would be presenting something or answering questions later than I would keep a to-do list in my notepad, phone or laptop and make some updates there to change my focus for a while (let my brain decompress), be productive and I would always keep a track ot the time spent in meetings alongside this so if I was every quizzed on what I'm doing I could say "I'm tracking how many hours of my productivity are lost through these meetings" then be able to tell them how many were lost in the last month.

That would annoy some of the career managers but that was kind of the point I guess. I really disliked the sort of people who have meetings to establish how important they are and waste others time.

PhoenixEddy said:

I have many meetings at work, and I find after about 15 to 20 minutes it starts to get hard

Have you considered using AI to take notes for you that you can refer back to later? There is a good list of various services that do that here: 

https://clickup.com/blog/ai-tools-for-meeting-notes/

This way you can teach yourself to defocus on the parts that are not direclty relevant to you and skim over these at the time but bring your focus back where it is needed.

I used to be really blunt in meetings that were becoming irrelevant or boring  and say "look do you really need me here - I don't feel I am able to contribute and I have a lot to do - can I leave please?" and that tended to be a reminder that they were wasting peoples time.

It didn't blow back on me as I was trying to be productive rather than waffle away self importantly in the meeting.

Where I had to wait for a part where I would be presenting something or answering questions later than I would keep a to-do list in my notepad, phone or laptop and make some updates there to change my focus for a while (let my brain decompress), be productive and I would always keep a track ot the time spent in meetings alongside this so if I was every quizzed on what I'm doing I could say "I'm tracking how many hours of my productivity are lost through these meetings" then be able to tell them how many were lost in the last month.

That would annoy some of the career managers but that was kind of the point I guess. I really disliked the sort of people who have meetings to establish how important they are and waste others time.