Yup. Thankfully management at my old job understood this, we had one quick 10 minute catchup about 30 minutes into the day every day and that was it. If a project required several meeting, they were all done as close together as possible over as few days as possible, leaving as many free full days as reasonably could be achieved. It worked really well
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
I’m lucky to not have many meetings in my current dev job, but I get the same effect from having a dozen people a day asking for “quick” fixes for various bugs that are conveniently always more urgent than whatever big task I’m in the middle of.
The bug fixes themselves can have massive cognitive overhead. I’ve spent hours thinking about a problem to make a very small change. It takes focus to fix complex problems correctly.
Sounds like that should be someone’s full time job, not pulling someone else away from their actual job.
Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?
Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.
My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.
I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.
And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.
That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.
My previous job didn’t have a ticket tracker for my team. It was my first real job, so I didn’t realize how far we were straying from best practices. If I had some more experience, I would have pushed hard for ticket tracking. I was constantly disorganized, and my manager blamed me for not keeping track of everything. He was probably in his 50’s, he should have known better.
Hahaha I wish. There isn’t any real “management” to speak of where I’m at, and it’s a flat structure, meaning literally anyone can send me work and I’m just expected to do it. Right now I’m working the weekend to finish a task that someone else couldn’t do and it fell to me. There’s a ticketing system, but it’s only really half-used (of course, I myself turn these tasks into tickets, but that’s about it).
Trying to slowly change all this over time, because I love my job outside of this lack of management, but I also don’t hold any delusions about that.
Jesus fuck I would hate to work with you. At my job there’s a lot of teams working on a lot of projects with very tight deadlines, and if every request had to be routed through managers it would take 10x as long. When we ask people from other teams directly for help, “I’m sorry I’m too busy right now” is a perfectly acceptable response because we’ve all been there. We don’t need our managers to act like playground referees.
We’re all intelligent and capable workers and we get paid well to take initiative and solve things without running to mommy.
If every request is an emergency that needs to immediately interrupt everything else, then your throughput is drastically reduced. The extra cognitive load that comes from the interrupts also affects throughput. If you constantly have to watch DMs/channels/email for work that might pull you away from your existing work, you’re not hitting a deep work state.
Unless your role is intentionally interrupt-driven requests, it’s much better to drop items in a queue to be processed regularly. The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is. The last 30+ years of workflow research coupled with neuroscience have really highlighted the efficacy of queues.
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
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
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.
Meetings are rarely productive for anyone, neurotypical or not, once it gets bigger than like five people and/or hierarchy enters the room imo. Then it morphs into politics and showmanship.
Best meeting I’ve ever had was with two engineers. We were all on time, had prepared well, and lasted seven minutes because there were zero pleasantries, got right into breaking down the subject, and the answer was frank and forthright.
Sales team? Forget about keeping to schedule
I have about 3 meetings a week because I keep only the productive ones. I refuse to attend bullshit meetings.
My graph would look like the first one except after the meeting there’s a huge burst of activity because now everyone is more informed about what needs to be done and how to do it.
To be fair, my work has a culture of ridigly policing meetings to keep them on topic, no chitchat, no rambling, anyone who starts that tends to get called out immediately.
I had a former workplace like that, it was beautiful 🥹
We had a hot seat meeting where each department representative wasn’t even in the room until their individual staggered start time kicked in. One out, one in, cycling through each department until the meeting was over. They get to go back to their work and not be ‘meat’ in the room for fifteen minutes or more, we got focused reports from each as they filed in and out.
Sometimes I miss working for Germans, but “alles in Ordnung” cuts both ways - good luck breaking through the bureaucracy reporting chain and getting quick results
