I got to work for a few years with pivotal labs in the Bay Area. They had a policy called “just don’t have f&$@ing meetings.” At first I thought this was a bit crazy. How could we work without meetings? Then I realized that product owners, actual 10 minute stand ups, and a 30 minute weekly planning meeting was all we really needed to make amazing products. I’ve keep that philosophy ever since and it has worked very well in big and small organizations.
Pivotal is clearly a style that works well for some people. But couldn’t you categorise the constant pairing as a form of ongoin meeting? It doesn’t seem like the place to go if you want to be left alone...
It sounds like the meetings are compressed into the other two days of the week, which also sounds quite miserable.
I'd love to see an app that analyzes the internal meetings that happen inside a company and flags the repeat offenders. I've always found that a small percentage of people hold the most meetings. It also can be a bit awkward to reject their meeting invites constantly.
Leaders should remind people about the time-cost of meetings (here's a calculator to help: https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-...). There are meetings that can be beneficial for alignment, but then there are the reoccurring ones where people just want to know what you're working on.
The compression is surely miserable to start, but I hope people stick with it to see what happens next.
In Lean Manufacturing, a common process improvement technique is to tighten some constraint. E.g., if you normally have 10 boxes of parts in play, you drop it to 9 and see what happens. Probably something will happen, as they ended up at 10 for a reason. But then you consciously solve issues until 9 is as smooth as 10. The metaphor they use is ships in channels: if you lower the water level a bit, it will expose rocks, which you remove. Then you lower the water level a bit more.
My guess is that if these teams are doing weekly retros, they'll feel the pain of compression. People will then brainstorm ways to make the least useful meeting unnecessary. Or to make a longer meeting shorter, and therefore more efficient. First they'll start with the easy things, but eventually they may move on to rearranging workflows, cross-training, and maybe even swapping people among teams.
It's really weird to me that in office-work meetings take priority over direct value-generating work. Compare that with a factory floor or a restaurant, for example, where everybody gets that it's bad to randomly stop direct productivity. Hopefully having clear time constraints will help reverse that.
Hi, I’m a project manager. I’m the guy who is likely scheduling most of those meetings. Nice to meet you!
I think, by and large, we understand the cost of meetings, and don’t casually organize them without going through the alternatives. It’s not rocket science. My thought process is generally:
0. Before anything, come up with a written agenda and goals for the communication. Don’t move past this step until done.
1. Does this communication even need to happen? Maybe there is an internal document already I can point people to.
2. If not, Can this be done async over E-mail?
3. If not, can it be done over chat?
4. If not, can it be done in a series of 1:1s between me and each attendee?
5. If not, then a meeting has to happen. What’s the true minimal list of required attendees? Who is optional? I am loathe to waste the time of a productive individual contributor if I don’t have to. If I can invite his/her manager instead, I will. Sorry, that’s the Faustian bargain you make when becoming a manager!
6. What’s the shortest possible productive duration?
7. Is there a time slot that is miraculously free for everyone, respecting time zones and working hours for people?
8. If not, is there a time slot that works for most people?
If, again by some great miracle, there are multiple time slots that work, I favor ones that are adjacent to other meetings in their calendars, so as to not break up a productive no-meeting block.
I much prefer meetings to get compressed together as much as possible. If I'm going to get ripped out of my context for a meeting, I'd rather take that hit only once and carry it into as many meetings as possible.
For a while, I worked mostly remote, four days at home, one day in the office. I miss those days badly... I've never been more productive. Scheduling all the in-person meetings and status updates and planning work into the Monday in the office was the key. Embrace the suck, and the fact that no work will be done that day - you never get any real work done on a Monday anyway, and once you're into status meetings, it's all over anyway. But doing all of that planning and collaborating and getting the shit together on Monday meant the week was laid out, and Tuesday through Friday were freed up for big blocks of deep work. Bonus, not being physically in the office meant I was out of sight and out of mind, free to actually get some work done.
> It sounds like the meetings are compressed into the other two days of the week
That was my first thought, too. I was talking once to a guy who was hiring for a developer position that he couldn't get filled - he told me that he was sweetening the deal by ensuring the dev candidates that they wouldn't have to attend any meetings; he would attend all the meetings for them so they could focus on coding. I had a sneaking suspicion that they realized what he didn't realize... that they'd be on the hook not only for implementing everything that was discussed in these meetings but also interpreting them through him.
Maybe I'm off base here, but to me, meetings are not nearly as big a disruption to my IC work as random interruptions from teammates. Meetings are usually planned and able to be worked around and scheduled for. There is typically an agenda, and if there isn't, it's very simple to ask for one. If it's not valuable, don't go, or leave. If you must go, you can often get the meeting rescheduled - people in engineering organizations are surprisingly accommodating of the maker's schedule.
A random interruption by an engineer when you're trying to focus is much more disruptive because it's unplanned and often pulls you right out of the zone. Often times, especially for more senior engineers, an enormous amount of patience has to be practiced as you listen to someone ramble on as the context in your head flutters away, while they go in circles explaining the problem to themselves.
This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. My skills wouldn't be nearly as valuable if the problems were so cut and dry that I could just program a solution straight through without interrupting anyone for clarity. I don't quite get the hang wringing over being interrupted. It happens, and it happens especially more as you get more senior. Some of the best solutions to problems I've come up with have not been technical, but have come about by talking to people and realizing that maybe the technical solution we were pursuing wasn't the best one, and we could save a lot of time and money by solving the problem a different way.
I usually find adhoc interruptions are due to someone being blocked and spending 5 minutes with them can really turn their next few hours around. It's good for the team as a whole. Meetings on the other hand are minimum 30 minutes and usually involve half a dozen people. The bang for buck on interruptions is way higher than meetings.
At my current job I have about 10-15 meetings every week, and I'm an IC. It drives me crazy. I feel like I have to fight tooth and nail to get time to work on the project I'm assigned to.
The individual meetings aren't a big interruption on their own, but their scheduleing is usually the problem. I frequently will have half hour meetings in a day but sprinkled throughout the day, which means I am always just getting back into the zone when trying to work.
When you combine that with coworker interruptions and the need to eat I can end up with an entire day where I can't solve anything more than trivial problems.
I can always stay late or work on the weekends but I don't really have any desire to eat into my free time because management wants to constantly hear updates from me every day about how the very work they are interrupting is going
The best companies I’ve worked for establish a bit of a circadian rhythm around periods of collaboration and periods heads-down time. You need time for cross-pollination and free flow of conversation and ideas, but you also need contiguous time to execute and converge those ideas.
It’s best if the people you work along side all establish this same rhythm so you don’t have some people interrupting others who are in a heads-down period, or on the other token, people missing important meetings because they’re catching up on their work. It’s even better if these periods correspond with your sprint/development schedule as well.
We’ve started enforcing this at my current company by having a calendar bot that automatically deletes meetings on certain days if engineers are on the invite list. It was painful at first but everyone eventually got on the same rhythm and now I can actually get the time to complete my work.
> This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined.
Yeah, agreed. I've started watching the balance between meetings and interruptions, and I've noticed that too many interruptions is often an indicator of too few meetings and/or poor planning, while too many meetings is often an indicator of not enough one-on-one communication in the office.
I'm fantasizing about something to schedule micro-meetings. Not a heavy hammer like days of quiet time, just something lightweight that only protects my flow-time a little bit, not a lot, by design. I want to and expect to have to talk to people, I'd just get a small amount of control over when, instead of an interruption right in the middle of my thought.
Well-run meetings really depends on your company's culture and management support.
I find that a lot of bad meetings are driven by procrastination: The person holding the meeting is doing it as a way to get out of work. Other times, the person holding a bad meeting has an inflated ego and thinks a whole bunch of people need to pay very close attention to something that doesn't really matter.
If your organization doesn't have these problems, then great!
There’s only one day per week when I get absolutely nothing done: the day I have to leave home and spend half an hour commuting to work. The sense of dislocation caused by this journey is palpable. I lose context and my thoughts become scattered. I feel overwhelmed and can’t help but watch my worries come to the fore.
By contrast, working from the comfort of my home is pure bliss. I have my standing desk and large monitor. I have natural sunlight filtering in through the window. I see some trees and hear the sounds of my quiet residential street. The rhythmic cadence of my mechanical keyboard soothes me and quietes my nerves. I’m focused and ready to take on a challenge of any size or complexity.
Meetings while WFH are not a major distraction. The other participants are cleanly separated from my world. I have a high-quality headset and microphone, which takes away the stress of being misunderstood. I can easily show my screen, or say nothing at all while tuning out a meeting that isn’t helping me get my job done.
I for one am waiting with bated breath for the world to catch up with the idea that some types of work are best done from home. Offices are the true black holes into which human productivity disappears.
I'm someone that struggles to work from home, and who really likes having the dislocation. It helps me get into work mode, and back out again, it helps me separate my life and my work. I like being in place with everyone working, and much prefer being physically present at a meeting. So basically your opposite.
I think the key take away is that there should be options, what works for one doesn't for others.
For what it's worth I find largely the opposite. Getting out of the house, the physical break of traveling from point A to point B, entering the "Working Place" with its "Work Computer" and "Work Desk" etc. all gets me focused on work. Home is too full of distractions, everything from chores that should be done, to personal projects on my computer, to that interesting magazine article I've been meaning to read lying on my desk.
The corollary to this is that it makes leaving Work at the end of day a lot easier. Once I leave the physical building where Work is done I am no longer working.
Having Home separated, both physically and mentally, from Work makes both more easy to focus on.
Just to provide a differing opinion, my daily office is the place that I feel most productive. When I'm home, I'm never in work mode because I never (99.9%) work from home.
I like being around lots of people and having face-to-face conversations to work through problems.
As nice as WFH is, I’m cautious about advocating it. We should be careful what we wish for. I’d be worried about management logic deciding that if my job can truly be done from home, it can be done from India.
The key concept Cal talks about that's relevant for this discussion is "attention residue". When you switch from low-stimuli, high-value work that requires deep focus to high-stimuli, shallower work (like meetings), it can take up to 30 minutes to really switch back to focus mode again.
During my career, other individual engineers interrupting me while I’m working has had a far greater impact on my time than scheduled meetings. What I’ve been dreaming of is an app for interrupting someone that delays requests and batches them up. No walking up to someone at any time and saying “just a quick question”, plan and expect to wait a few minutes.
In a sprint review recently I brought up the issue of, "Hi Phil." This is where someone IMs you with just "Hi Phil" and then you have to sit there and look at the "X is typing", "X is not typing" for 5 minutes.
I don't mind people asking a question, but just put it all on one line, "Hi Phil. This is the question..." That way I can sometimes just fire back a quick answer and it's not as distracting.
It makes sense too - you wouldn't walk up to someone, tap them on the shoulder and then make them wait before asking a question.
My pet peeve is when someone does the "Hi, I have a question/problem" message without actually sending the question. It's hard to get that out of your head after seeing it. And they always seem to send the question and immediately go to lunch or a long meeting.
I explained to some people that it doesn't work well with my anxiety to see "Hey I think I found a bug in X" and then just get no further details for two hours. One person has actually listened and writes me up an email or whole long message now. Everyone else responded by saying it seemed too rude and inconsiderate to not ask about your day first so they continue to do that... You can still start your message with "How was your weekend?" but just type the rest of the message too without waiting for a response...
The biggest problem for corporate meetings and perhaps why there are so many of them, why they're so frequent, and why they're so long:
* Meeting initiator fails to really consider if everyone on the invite list needs to be there.
* Meeting initiator fails to consider if a meeting will have all the necessary people in attendance in order to have the meeting (and furthermore, what if a required attendee can't make it? Can you still have the meeting? If so, they probably didn't need to be there in the first place)
* Meeting initiator does not have much of an agenda or firm outcome in mind when organizing the meeting (other than some topic or 2... i.e. "Discuss new feature X")
* Meeting initiator and/or attendees don't take any notes at all and then don't distribute the notes to people who may want to be informed but simply did not need to be in attendance.
There are other issues with why there are so many meetings, too, such as the structure of the organization and/or project being worked on, whether the culture of the company hinges on having "buy-in" from many different stakeholders, or a consistent "ask for permission" kind of culture. Also, a culture where people don't interact well between groups (marketing and engineering, product management and QA, and so on) or have poor relationships between these groups. Meetings serve as a more formal proxy in order to get people informed or consensus on things between disparate groups in the organization. These are additional factors that seem to play into the need for more meetings.
At my workplace we have a daily DMZ (De-Meetinged Zone) from 11 to 3. Since engineers tend to roll in btwn 10 and 11 and most product ppl work normal hours and leave by 6, you end up with a lot of meetings btwn 3 and 6. But at least they aren't methodically fracturing your entire day anymore.
Care is needed when scheduling. Standard parallelization stuff. If all your sub teams want to have sub team meetings (retro, planning, blah blah), try to parallelize those meetings so there's more time on the clock for cross team meetings. If you don't do this, manager schedule ppl will start violating the DMZ.
To manage Slack interruptions disable whatever your personality is distracted by. For me I turn off all notifs that aren't direct messages to me or @mentions. I hide chat rooms with no unread messages. And most importantly I don't keep Slack on top 24/7 on some second monitor. When ppl need me the client grabs my attention and I answer. The rest of the chatter can be read at my leisure. We use emojis in our engineering channels to make it easy to scan for action items like code reviews and we use threads for replying to ppl so the channel is like the top level view of a message board.
This is functioning fairly well with ~30 engineers at the org but i think we will need to more consciously manage the 3-6 window if we doubled in size again. Fred Brooks stuff, the 3 hour window is fixed but as teams grow so does the communication overhead.
What killed me was that people wouldn't schedule back-to-back meetings because of stragglers to the second one, cutting into it. This meant that there would be an hour meeting, then an hour gap, then another hour meeting. Never enough time to get back into "the zone" in the code.
The last company I was at set the meeting times to end 5 minutes before the end of the hour (or half hour) to prevent this issue.
It helped but wasn't completely effective since we were split over 3 floors of a building (floor 4, 20 and 21), so it could take over 5 minutes to get from room to room.
My previous company was awful about scheduling meetings. They had a strong propensity to throw big timewasters right in the middle of the most focused part of my day, like sprint planning and all-hands meetings.
Probably part of the reason I'm gone now, but it is incredibly annoying to be in a groove and forcibly interrupted in the middle of it for an managerial ego-stroking session. (Also, you're paying me a decent chunk of change to sit there bored out of my skull).
Alternatively, I schedule 9-2 for every day as programming time. A company-wide policy though would be great, and having entire days blocked on or off for programming sounds like it would work much better than my method across timezones. However, having a couple of hours at the end of each day is super useful to keep collaboration with non engineers humming too.
The vast majority of individual contributor developers do not have the freedom to simply block off two thirds of their time at work from meetings. Company cultures differ widely - I've worked places where each of the following were true:
- Meeting organizers actively used the scheduling assistant to determine the best time and room for a meeting
- Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient for them and whoever made it made it
- Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient then threw a fit if you declined due to another commitment
If you're a junior dev and your lead schedules a meeting for 11am you'd be hard pressed to tell them to pound sand because that's your programming time. Seniors have more leeway but I'm sure seniors at Facebook or Microsoft still probably aren't declining meetings with their boss because it's programming time.
My company has a designated no-meeting-day for engineers and it's been good for the reasons in the article - I'd love to see it expand. It's also nice to have a designated day that everyone gets errands done. Need an oil change and they're only open during business hours? Great - everyone gets it done at the same time when they're not trying to contact each other - no need to coordinate.
The other thing has been as a last-resort day for meetings that really need to happen soon, but half the people you need to get in the room are just in meetings all the time except that one special day, so you make a special one-time exception when you really need to. I suspect that this is just a band-aid though - those people can't be as productive as they think they are if they can't control their schedule more.
This is great if the whole company agrees on the no meeting day. If every team has a different day, and I have to hold a cross-team meeting, then at least one person will have to violate their no-meeting day.
I try my best to respect people’s preferences but if by some miracle I’ve found a time slot that is actually free for the other 6 participants but happens on your “no meeting day” I’m going to regrettably have to schedule it then.
We do this, with Mondays and Fridays being commit/celebrate days respectively (work still gets done on those days but the meetings that set/review the sprint goals are held on them), and the three middle days of the week being "focus" days. It's worked well for us so far.
I’ve worked on some pretty complex stuff in my time and I can only think of maybe one time where it was necessary to have a ‘meeting’ (which was more like an impromptu ‘let’s get 3 people to whiteboard this instead of 2’). I find the concept baffling and assume it’s for the benefit of people who don’t do anything to feel good about themselves. (Especially the “daily stand up” concept.) Anything complicated enough to require input from multiple parties is usually better discussed asynchronously via email. But I also don’t find interruptions to be particularly distracting so maybe I just don’t get it.
If you are in control of your own calendar, don't wait for your org to do something like this: just block off your own productive time and decline all meetings during it.
I have about 20 hours worth of meetings per week. I've been arranging my meetings into as few days a week as possible, and it helps a lot, but eventually there always ends up being overflow into other days. I've also gotten complaints that I'm not flexible. Lastly, I've found these days to be utterly exhausting where by the end of the day I'm non-functional. It is much better than constant interruptions, though.
We broke the time up into mornings and afternoons. Most mornings and afternoons were "no meetings" time. If there was a meeting scheduled in a morning or afternoon, then that became the prioritized time to schedule any other meetings that came up. Worked great.
Most people aren't willing to skip meetings, or walk out of meetings when they realize the meeting is unproductive. Both are productive behaviors.
[+] [-] trcollinson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasmoth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wdr1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukethomas|8 years ago|reply
I'd love to see an app that analyzes the internal meetings that happen inside a company and flags the repeat offenders. I've always found that a small percentage of people hold the most meetings. It also can be a bit awkward to reject their meeting invites constantly.
Leaders should remind people about the time-cost of meetings (here's a calculator to help: https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-...). There are meetings that can be beneficial for alignment, but then there are the reoccurring ones where people just want to know what you're working on.
Anyways, I'm working on a tool to help cut down on the "what's going on" meetings: https://www.fridayfeedback.com
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
In Lean Manufacturing, a common process improvement technique is to tighten some constraint. E.g., if you normally have 10 boxes of parts in play, you drop it to 9 and see what happens. Probably something will happen, as they ended up at 10 for a reason. But then you consciously solve issues until 9 is as smooth as 10. The metaphor they use is ships in channels: if you lower the water level a bit, it will expose rocks, which you remove. Then you lower the water level a bit more.
My guess is that if these teams are doing weekly retros, they'll feel the pain of compression. People will then brainstorm ways to make the least useful meeting unnecessary. Or to make a longer meeting shorter, and therefore more efficient. First they'll start with the easy things, but eventually they may move on to rearranging workflows, cross-training, and maybe even swapping people among teams.
It's really weird to me that in office-work meetings take priority over direct value-generating work. Compare that with a factory floor or a restaurant, for example, where everybody gets that it's bad to randomly stop direct productivity. Hopefully having clear time constraints will help reverse that.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
I think, by and large, we understand the cost of meetings, and don’t casually organize them without going through the alternatives. It’s not rocket science. My thought process is generally:
0. Before anything, come up with a written agenda and goals for the communication. Don’t move past this step until done.
1. Does this communication even need to happen? Maybe there is an internal document already I can point people to.
2. If not, Can this be done async over E-mail?
3. If not, can it be done over chat?
4. If not, can it be done in a series of 1:1s between me and each attendee?
5. If not, then a meeting has to happen. What’s the true minimal list of required attendees? Who is optional? I am loathe to waste the time of a productive individual contributor if I don’t have to. If I can invite his/her manager instead, I will. Sorry, that’s the Faustian bargain you make when becoming a manager!
6. What’s the shortest possible productive duration?
7. Is there a time slot that is miraculously free for everyone, respecting time zones and working hours for people?
8. If not, is there a time slot that works for most people?
If, again by some great miracle, there are multiple time slots that work, I favor ones that are adjacent to other meetings in their calendars, so as to not break up a productive no-meeting block.
[+] [-] city41|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|8 years ago|reply
True, but it forces meetings to compete with meetings rather than development in the schedule.
[+] [-] megaman22|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|8 years ago|reply
That was my first thought, too. I was talking once to a guy who was hiring for a developer position that he couldn't get filled - he told me that he was sweetening the deal by ensuring the dev candidates that they wouldn't have to attend any meetings; he would attend all the meetings for them so they could focus on coding. I had a sneaking suspicion that they realized what he didn't realize... that they'd be on the hook not only for implementing everything that was discussed in these meetings but also interpreting them through him.
[+] [-] city41|8 years ago|reply
This is on Chrome 66.0.3359.139, Windows 10, fullscreen on a 1920x1080 screen. I get the same layout issue in Firefox.
[+] [-] jarsin|8 years ago|reply
Meeting # 2: No seriously, how many more images can we fit on the page?
Same meeting every week at pininterest
[+] [-] bthdonohue|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoorayimhelping|8 years ago|reply
A random interruption by an engineer when you're trying to focus is much more disruptive because it's unplanned and often pulls you right out of the zone. Often times, especially for more senior engineers, an enormous amount of patience has to be practiced as you listen to someone ramble on as the context in your head flutters away, while they go in circles explaining the problem to themselves.
This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. My skills wouldn't be nearly as valuable if the problems were so cut and dry that I could just program a solution straight through without interrupting anyone for clarity. I don't quite get the hang wringing over being interrupted. It happens, and it happens especially more as you get more senior. Some of the best solutions to problems I've come up with have not been technical, but have come about by talking to people and realizing that maybe the technical solution we were pursuing wasn't the best one, and we could save a lot of time and money by solving the problem a different way.
[+] [-] city41|8 years ago|reply
At my current job I have about 10-15 meetings every week, and I'm an IC. It drives me crazy. I feel like I have to fight tooth and nail to get time to work on the project I'm assigned to.
[+] [-] lovich|8 years ago|reply
When you combine that with coworker interruptions and the need to eat I can end up with an entire day where I can't solve anything more than trivial problems.
I can always stay late or work on the weekends but I don't really have any desire to eat into my free time because management wants to constantly hear updates from me every day about how the very work they are interrupting is going
[+] [-] ninkendo|8 years ago|reply
It’s best if the people you work along side all establish this same rhythm so you don’t have some people interrupting others who are in a heads-down period, or on the other token, people missing important meetings because they’re catching up on their work. It’s even better if these periods correspond with your sprint/development schedule as well.
We’ve started enforcing this at my current company by having a calendar bot that automatically deletes meetings on certain days if engineers are on the invite list. It was painful at first but everyone eventually got on the same rhythm and now I can actually get the time to complete my work.
[+] [-] yoodenvranx|8 years ago|reply
- no headphones: you can talk to me
- headphone covers one ear: you can talk to me if it is important
- headphone covers both ears: only talk to me when the building is burning
It's not perfect by any means but it worked quite well.
[+] [-] dahart|8 years ago|reply
Yeah, agreed. I've started watching the balance between meetings and interruptions, and I've noticed that too many interruptions is often an indicator of too few meetings and/or poor planning, while too many meetings is often an indicator of not enough one-on-one communication in the office.
I'm fantasizing about something to schedule micro-meetings. Not a heavy hammer like days of quiet time, just something lightweight that only protects my flow-time a little bit, not a lot, by design. I want to and expect to have to talk to people, I'd just get a small amount of control over when, instead of an interruption right in the middle of my thought.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|8 years ago|reply
I find that a lot of bad meetings are driven by procrastination: The person holding the meeting is doing it as a way to get out of work. Other times, the person holding a bad meeting has an inflated ego and thinks a whole bunch of people need to pay very close attention to something that doesn't really matter.
If your organization doesn't have these problems, then great!
[+] [-] draw_down|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sigfubar|8 years ago|reply
By contrast, working from the comfort of my home is pure bliss. I have my standing desk and large monitor. I have natural sunlight filtering in through the window. I see some trees and hear the sounds of my quiet residential street. The rhythmic cadence of my mechanical keyboard soothes me and quietes my nerves. I’m focused and ready to take on a challenge of any size or complexity.
Meetings while WFH are not a major distraction. The other participants are cleanly separated from my world. I have a high-quality headset and microphone, which takes away the stress of being misunderstood. I can easily show my screen, or say nothing at all while tuning out a meeting that isn’t helping me get my job done.
I for one am waiting with bated breath for the world to catch up with the idea that some types of work are best done from home. Offices are the true black holes into which human productivity disappears.
[+] [-] Balero|8 years ago|reply
I think the key take away is that there should be options, what works for one doesn't for others.
[+] [-] dagw|8 years ago|reply
The corollary to this is that it makes leaving Work at the end of day a lot easier. Once I leave the physical building where Work is done I am no longer working.
Having Home separated, both physically and mentally, from Work makes both more easy to focus on.
[+] [-] morinted|8 years ago|reply
I like being around lots of people and having face-to-face conversations to work through problems.
[+] [-] tobyhinloopen|8 years ago|reply
We meet once a week. That day in the week no work is done. Meetings are somewhat productive, and they are "required", but they don't get work done.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilbetron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skadamat|8 years ago|reply
The key concept Cal talks about that's relevant for this discussion is "attention residue". When you switch from low-stimuli, high-value work that requires deep focus to high-stimuli, shallower work (like meetings), it can take up to 30 minutes to really switch back to focus mode again.
Relevant excerpt on attention residue - https://hackernoon.com/excerpted-from-deep-work-by-cal-newpo...
[+] [-] dahart|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philbarr|8 years ago|reply
I don't mind people asking a question, but just put it all on one line, "Hi Phil. This is the question..." That way I can sometimes just fire back a quick answer and it's not as distracting.
It makes sense too - you wouldn't walk up to someone, tap them on the shoulder and then make them wait before asking a question.
[+] [-] squeaky-clean|8 years ago|reply
I explained to some people that it doesn't work well with my anxiety to see "Hey I think I found a bug in X" and then just get no further details for two hours. One person has actually listened and writes me up an email or whole long message now. Everyone else responded by saying it seemed too rude and inconsiderate to not ask about your day first so they continue to do that... You can still start your message with "How was your weekend?" but just type the rest of the message too without waiting for a response...
[+] [-] tobyhinloopen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speby|8 years ago|reply
* Meeting initiator fails to really consider if everyone on the invite list needs to be there.
* Meeting initiator fails to consider if a meeting will have all the necessary people in attendance in order to have the meeting (and furthermore, what if a required attendee can't make it? Can you still have the meeting? If so, they probably didn't need to be there in the first place)
* Meeting initiator does not have much of an agenda or firm outcome in mind when organizing the meeting (other than some topic or 2... i.e. "Discuss new feature X")
* Meeting initiator and/or attendees don't take any notes at all and then don't distribute the notes to people who may want to be informed but simply did not need to be in attendance.
There are other issues with why there are so many meetings, too, such as the structure of the organization and/or project being worked on, whether the culture of the company hinges on having "buy-in" from many different stakeholders, or a consistent "ask for permission" kind of culture. Also, a culture where people don't interact well between groups (marketing and engineering, product management and QA, and so on) or have poor relationships between these groups. Meetings serve as a more formal proxy in order to get people informed or consensus on things between disparate groups in the organization. These are additional factors that seem to play into the need for more meetings.
[+] [-] heckanoobs|8 years ago|reply
Care is needed when scheduling. Standard parallelization stuff. If all your sub teams want to have sub team meetings (retro, planning, blah blah), try to parallelize those meetings so there's more time on the clock for cross team meetings. If you don't do this, manager schedule ppl will start violating the DMZ.
To manage Slack interruptions disable whatever your personality is distracted by. For me I turn off all notifs that aren't direct messages to me or @mentions. I hide chat rooms with no unread messages. And most importantly I don't keep Slack on top 24/7 on some second monitor. When ppl need me the client grabs my attention and I answer. The rest of the chatter can be read at my leisure. We use emojis in our engineering channels to make it easy to scan for action items like code reviews and we use threads for replying to ppl so the channel is like the top level view of a message board.
This is functioning fairly well with ~30 engineers at the org but i think we will need to more consciously manage the 3-6 window if we doubled in size again. Fred Brooks stuff, the 3 hour window is fixed but as teams grow so does the communication overhead.
[+] [-] ralphc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Johnny555|8 years ago|reply
It helped but wasn't completely effective since we were split over 3 floors of a building (floor 4, 20 and 21), so it could take over 5 minutes to get from room to room.
[+] [-] outside2344|8 years ago|reply
I actually enjoy the break sometime and the sidebars on the way to and after the meeting are sometimes great ways to get micromeetings done.
Having the rest blocked gives me a two solid blocks of three hours to do stuff.
[+] [-] satokema|8 years ago|reply
Probably part of the reason I'm gone now, but it is incredibly annoying to be in a groove and forcibly interrupted in the middle of it for an managerial ego-stroking session. (Also, you're paying me a decent chunk of change to sit there bored out of my skull).
[+] [-] hammerbrostime|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|8 years ago|reply
- Meeting organizers actively used the scheduling assistant to determine the best time and room for a meeting
- Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient for them and whoever made it made it
- Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient then threw a fit if you declined due to another commitment
If you're a junior dev and your lead schedules a meeting for 11am you'd be hard pressed to tell them to pound sand because that's your programming time. Seniors have more leeway but I'm sure seniors at Facebook or Microsoft still probably aren't declining meetings with their boss because it's programming time.
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|8 years ago|reply
The other thing has been as a last-resort day for meetings that really need to happen soon, but half the people you need to get in the room are just in meetings all the time except that one special day, so you make a special one-time exception when you really need to. I suspect that this is just a band-aid though - those people can't be as productive as they think they are if they can't control their schedule more.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
I try my best to respect people’s preferences but if by some miracle I’ve found a time slot that is actually free for the other 6 participants but happens on your “no meeting day” I’m going to regrettably have to schedule it then.
[+] [-] skrebbel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbnj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajacombinator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kthejoker2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriskanan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomohawk|8 years ago|reply
Most people aren't willing to skip meetings, or walk out of meetings when they realize the meeting is unproductive. Both are productive behaviors.