
Your calendar should be a whitelist, not a blacklist - mcrittenden
https://critter.blog/2020/08/03/your-calendar-should-be-a-whitelist-not-a-blacklist/
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Traster
This seems to acheive the exact opposite of what the author wants to achieve.
If you create a small window of meeting time you are going to end up with any
meeting of more than 3 people violating atleast one person's constraints. I
think it goes to the core problem that meetings are the point at which an
engineer actually has to acknowledge other people exist and have their own
needs. If you are the type of person that needs deep, uninterrupted time
that's fine - block out the time you need. But if you over-constrain your
calendar you're creating huge headaches for the people who want to meet with
you. Who wants to meet with you? Your boss, your product managers, your sales
people, your project planners. All people who are going to dictate how useful
your "Deep Work" is, all people who are going to be talking to your boss about
your performance.

I've seen so many senior engineers so wrapped up in their small area of focus
they've completly forgotten there's an enormous company around them that's
meant to be telling you what the product needs to look like and selling it.
Your value to your company isn't measured in git commits. It's measured in
revenue.

~~~
charles_f
When meetings become a systemic problem, having some forcing mechanisms to
reduce their number and protect time can be a useful tool.

The problem you're mentioning is solvable by defining office hours across the
team to make people constraints the same for everyone.

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ebg13
> _We should be able to say say “I’m free for meetings from 2-5pm on Tuesdays
> and Thursdays, and if you want to talk to me then that’s when you can.”_

It's a nice idea, but the moment you have more than a very small handful of
people who need to meet this becomes untenable and obnoxious.

"Sorry, Mike says he'll only meet between 2 and 4 on Wednesdays, so I guess
we'll have this meeting in 17 years when that works for everyone else. Or
maybe Mike is just fired now? Either way, I suppose."

> _In most companies, doing that would make you an annoyance. Those companies
> don’t respect Deep Work._

The other perspective, of course, is that you don't respect collaboration.

~~~
city41
We need both collaboration and deep work. In my experience, deep work is just
shy of non-existent (or gets done late in the evening and on weekends). A
proper balance between the two is when a company can truly shine.

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charles_f
I've gone back and forth on the topic, between protecting my calendar, which
seem to do little good because people don't care, and deciding I would just
say "no" if I don't want to go, which doesn't seem to fly well in my
organization's mentality.

Overall I think whether blacklist or whitelist, these are just mechanisms to
help reduce a systemic problem. Whitelisting works ok if your problem is
scattered work time (hell to the craze for 45m meetings that leave you with
15m of useless time in between). Blacklist works as a defense mechanism when
your calendar gets abused. But overall it would be better that the systemic
problem gets fixed in the first place. So overall these address mostly the
planning part of meetings, not the other part of the iceberg which is the
usefulness altogether.

However, on that topic, on a conceptual level, I really like approaches of
companies like basecamp or what's described in emergency remote[1]: replace
meeting with tools. But I don't believe it's always the efficient way to get
to decisions, when you need a meeting, planning can be collaborative (eg [2]
scheduler which just iteratively asks people for their preference until
finding a slot that works) rather than dictated by the organizers.

[1]
[https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote](https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote)
[2]

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mcrittenden
This seems to have been flagged for some reason. It disappeared from the front
page suddenly.

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dpcx
I truly wish I'd ever worked anywhere that would actually allow this. There
are too many mandatory meetings that simply don't make this feasible for (what
I would assume is) a large portion of the populace.

~~~
dogma1138
Are the meetings really mandatory? Or just assumed to be mandatory? I’m part
of an architecture team and we’ve all agreed to implement a policy where
unless absolutely required (e.g. multiple SMEs are needed) there shouldn’t be
more than one team member in a meeting. Even our weekly team meetings aren’t
mandatory unless you are on the agenda explicitly if you can attend you should
but if you have more important things to do then no one would mind if you
don’t.

~~~
charles_f
I'm a manager of a team of 8. I've set a rule that you are free to skip or
escape any meeting. We even use the nickname "the 2 feet rule : if your time
is better spent someplace else use your 2 feet and leave.

I rarely see someone skip a meeting, and exceptionally seen someone leave one
; and almost every time they justify why. This is despite renewing the
statement almost every meeting. And the meetings I'm in, despite having value
most of the time, are NOT perfect in any regards, NOT useful or enjoyable to
everyone, and do not require everyone in.

I'm regularly sending anonymous surveys on topics. One had questions around
meetings, cadences and masses. About half the team doesn't mind the meetings
and saw value in them, the other figures we have too many. The reasons why
people are not leaving were majorly 1. peer pressure and fear of looking bad
and 2. FOMO. And I consistently get good reviews as a manager...

I'm balancing between limiting the attendance (but ego / disappointment of not
being invited?), reversing the default (why are you here?) or simply
cancelling/forbidding them and trying to replace by other media (online
collaboration?).

But the fact is that in a team with a lax manager on the topic who keeps
repeating "not mandatory, get out if you want, no hard feelings", peer
pressure is enough to keep people in.

~~~
dogma1138
>But the fact is that in a team with a lax manager on the topic who keeps
repeating "not mandatory, get out if you want, no hard feelings", peer
pressure is enough to keep people in.

That really depends on the team dynamics, overall communications and how much
time team members have one on one with their manager.

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lovetocode
This article speaks to the deepest parts of my soul.

~~~
dogma1138
Start blocking time as “tentative” in chunks, then when it gets too much
adjust the chunk to fit the meetings you need / want to attend and set the
rest to busy.

I’ve been doing that for the past few years I also usually have chunks set as
busy for the morning end of day to make sure I get an orderly start and end of
each day.

At least anecdotally my productivity has improved.

I get an hour at the start and end of each day to catch up and tie any loose
ends to make things don’t fall between the cracks.

It really depends on your organization and workload tho so ymmv.

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dguillot
This article is a waste of your time.

There's better things to read in life.

