Yeah, to me it's brutal to have to listen for an hour to something totally unrelated to the thing that I've gotta get done by the end of the week. I can listen

Yeah, to me it's brutal to have to listen for an hour to something totally unrelated to the thing that I've gotta get done by the end of the week. I can listen to virtually anything people have to say, but don't expect me to be effective at the actual work that day. It's one thing if a meeting or presentation is pertinent to the product I'm working on, especially if it involves my team specifically. It's another when it's some broad company thing that, if there was no meeting at all, would have zero measurable impact on what sort of work I'm doing. In that case, combine more of these meetings into a single day of the week where I'm not expected to do any work. Why? Because my work, when distracted, is always worse than when there is no distraction. When work is distracted, there's a time penalty when code is rejected in code review and work needs to be refactored.