One of the things I absolutely despise at work are meetings. If I seem grumpy in a particular week, it's probably because I had 20+ hours worth of meetings that week, and I feel very unproductive. As a programmer, I subconsciously measure the amount of work I do, by the numbers of line of code that I write; days when I'm stuck in meetings all day, I contribute zero lines of code.
There's several reasons why I hate meetings. One is that it fragments my time. In order for me to really get into the groove of programming, I need a large contiguous block of time to get in the zone. If I have a meeting at 1:30-2:30pm, and then another one at 3:00-3:30pm, that half hour gap in between the meetings is useless because I can't use that time to program. Another scenario is, meetings where I'm invited to them, but I have absolutely no reason to be there, and it's a complete waste of my time. The last type of meeting I hate are the ones that take 30 minutes, but it could have easily been resolved by a couple of e-mails. These meetings are an incredible inefficient use of time.
The straw that broke the camel's back was last week when I was invited to join an 8am meeting. For those that know me well, I am not a morning person at all. In that entire meeting, I literally said two things, "hi, I'm on the call", and "bye." A day later, I was on a conference call where all these people needed answers, but they didn't invite the right people onto the call, so it was a waste of everyone's time.
All this has changed when I read a message that my division manager wrote in an internal mailing list. He will reject meeting invitations if:
- The meeting has no agenda.
- The meeting organizer has no convincing reason why his presence is required.
These two criteria are simple, yet powerful. I applied these rules today, and rejected two meetings. It felt very liberating to do so. What was the net effect? After those two meetings I was supposed to go to, someone posted the meeting minutes, and I spent a couple minutes reading through them. One of the meetings, they talked about stuff that I didn't need to know, and I wouldn't have had anything intelligent to say. The second meeting was a complete waste of time because no one had done their homework in advance of the call, so yet another huge waste of time. This little trick freed up two hours in my day to work on stuff that I should actually be working on.
So, hats off to my divisional manager for enlightening me. If anyone complains about it, I'll just say I'm emulating the powers above that govern me.
