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…
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.
This is great, also if you haven’t read it, you should read Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule by Paul Graham, it really helped me describe this concept to all of the managers I have had hah.
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 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”)
Diminishing Returns is the concept on a broader scale here
Ie: the more you add the less you get from adding, to the point of it becoming a complete negative
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.
Product Manager
As someone with ADHD zero work gets done until the meeting. It’s just waiting and stressing about missing the time.
