Sometimes, you know, you don't want to have breakfast meetings. But? Dinner meetings sometimes aren't fun either! And you know what? Lunch meetings? They are so irksome! Working itself, particularly when it is coupled with food, verges on the undesirable. Also, eating? Eating is so gross and over.

Says the Times luxury lifestyle lady Lisa Belkin:

You can do as Aileen McCabe-Maucher, a psychotherapist, advises her patients to do, and put all invitations through the last-days-on-earth test. "I encourage clients to begin guarding their time and acting as if this week were the last week of their lives," Ms. McCabe-Maucher said. "If so, would they really spend it wasting precious hours in boring unproductive breakfast or dinner meetings that yield zero results?"

Belkin notes, "With that standard, it's hard to imagine you would ever go to work at all." Thankfully she doesn't have to!

Notwithstanding the ickypoo mingling of the obvious and the unattainable, there is some actual money-making advice to be had:

Or you can do as Mark Amtower does, and dine only with companions willing to put their money where their mouth is. After tiring of acquaintances inviting him out to shoot the breeze, Mr. Amtower, a business consultant, began charging $600 an hour with a four-hour minimum.

"If someone wants to take me to breakfast or lunch and I know all they want to do is pick my brain for free advice, I tell them they have to buy a four-hour block of time," he said of the policy he adopted in the last few years. "This does not mean I don't take meetings any more, just that I am very selective, and I will not 'do breakfast' just because someone is willing to pay $20 for eggs."

By the way, Mark Amtower, the article doesn't note, runs an online government marketing resource, which pretty much means those $600 lunches are paid for by your tax dollars.