On meetings
Meetings are rarely a good idea. It’s better to sit physically close to the people you work closely with, and turn around in your chair and talk to each other as issues arise. In other words, brief, frequent one-on-ones, as needed, are better than events on the calendar with lots of people.
Maybe you disagree, on the basis that you hate being interrupted just as you’re trying to focus on something, and prefer to block out focus time and meeting time separately.
But in my experience, flow states mostly happen for mindless repetitive work, like washing dishes or driving on the highway. Work worth doing is too hard and unspecified to get in the zone on anyway.1
Most people are too prideful to ask for help soon enough when they need it, so if they’re at the point where they’re willing to turn to their colleague with a problem, they must be pretty blocked. Better to solve it now than wait for a meeting to figure it out later.
Another reason you might prefer scheduled meetings to spontaneous ones is you want the time to polish things and then present them to your colleagues once they’re neat and tidy. But it’s precisely when things are in flux that your colleagues are most helpful. You can’t give suggestions on something that’s already finished.
Here’s another pro-meeting line: people are busy today, so we need to schedule later in the week. I don’t believe it. If you pick a random person at a random time, they’re not heads-down working at full capacity. More likely, they’re checking their email. If you truly can’t find a time in the next few hours when everyone’s free, you’re inviting too many people.
Why? Because if the meeting is important to the people you’re inviting, then it would be bad for them to have to wait a week. And if it’s not important to them, then they shouldn’t be invited.
What about wanting to invite all the key stakeholders to be a part of a decision? Baloney. Decisions are not made in groups of more than two or three at a time. The more realistic approach is to figure out a consensus with one-on-ones. Then you can have a meeting to make it official. The Japanese call it “nemawashi,” apparently.2
What happens in large meetings is two or three people talk while everyone else waits for the meeting to end. Worse, but also common, is when one person talks while everyone else waits for them to finish.
If you would like to discuss this post, feel free to message me. Just don’t ask to put something on the calendar.
I expect this is the point where there will be the most reasonable disagreement. I’ll add that I find it very easy to fall back asleep after being woken up. Perhaps that’s related to my relative willingness to switch between tasks. You could say people have different levels of psychological inertia.
They also apparently assign people to no projects instead of firing them, with the expectation that they’ll resign out of honor. This doesn’t work with Americans, who will continue to accept the paycheck. I learned this from the TV show Silicon Valley, so it might not be true.