Yeah, I have to wrap up what I’m working on so that I can be available for the “quick meeting” which usually means I’m doing nothing for 15-20 minutes as I can’t get started on anything else. If I’m caught not doing well, I get in trouble for the productivity, so I have to pretend.
When the 5-10 minute meeting runs closer to 45, I’m out an hour I could have been working.
Not the end of the world, but when we have these at least once, if not twice a day…
I have found that if the meeting is actually quick (sub 20 minutes) rebounding is not as difficult. When the “quick meeting” turns into a check in + “do we have time to talk about…” + any other number of meandering paths a meeting can travel down, I’ll have a hard time getting back into task mode.
Something that helps me is to take a walk right after those meetings. Helps me reset when I get back to my desk.
I’ve had had to stop medication due to high blood pressure.
Yippeeeeeeee!
Some drugs help, but only if you can get the person organizing the meeting to take them.
This is why you make your own work better, improve the team’s work, and position yourself as a candidate for team lead by insisting that meeting timeboxes are enforced.
Even if it breaks productivity by cutting things off the first few times, it will train everyone to get to the point, which will make everything better after the first few breakages.
I typically have 8-10 meetings a day. I try to either have 60-90 min in the morning and/or 60-90 at the end of the day for focus time… Unfortunately the end of day sometimes gets nuked because I am fried from all of the meetings
My old job I used to have a lot of days where I’d have meetings every half hour or often consecutively. It was impossible to actually get anything big done because I’d just always be organizing notes from the last one or prepping for the next one. I between it was all I could do to put out fires. It was insane.
What is your job? If those meetings are just 30 minutes that’s already 5 hours.
Stand up / syncs / recruiter meetings / follow ups - they are usually only 15 minutes, so you can churn em out. They are easier to do than a daily email
For software engineers, problem is management thought you could just hire a ton of people to solve the problem. Then the people who could actually solve the problem are stuck in meetings all day explaining it to people who can’t even understand the problem you keep explaining to them. Fun times.
The people that don’t understand the problem usually are management, and I have to spend an exhausting time each day explaining to them why the problem exists and why it takes so long to fix it. I once was honestly telling them their meetings were a big part of the delays. Which then obviously led to more meetings on “how we can better communicate so we can have less meetings and more productive time”. I wish I was joking.
The good old Mythical Man Hour.
(In simple terms, as the number of people increases, the communications overheads also increase, generally faster, so if you have more people a greater proportion of time is wasted, hence work done doesn’t increase proportionally to the number of people. Or if you just want to inform management that more people won’t simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of “If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn’t mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month”)
Or if you just want to inform management that more people won’t simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of “If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn’t mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month”
Management: “I don’t have time for theoretical discussions. Marketing says this releases in two weeks and you better get it done. Do you need more resources?”
“It can’t be done in this time frame.”
“Should’ve come and asked the experts how long would it take before accepting marketing’s estimates”
“So either find us more time or chose what we’re going to drop for the release”
And yeah, I’ve used this. (Then again, I’m pretty senior and seen and done a lot)
Missing the dip before the meeting where you have to prepare for the meeting.
Or the anxiety of what the meeting will be about that spans the entire morning beforehand.
Yeah I was gonna say, just go ahead and mirror that and also make the ball sad