
Read This If You Hate Meetings - robg
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/read-this-if-you-hate-meetings/
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9oliYQjP
Here are some tips for those of us makers that are forced to be on a manager's
schedule from time to time:

 _Meeting avoidance techniques_

-Pickup the phone if an email thread gets longer than 3 emails. Long email threads are the carrots that dangle in front of a potential meeting coordinator. A phone call, while disruptive, can often clarify things better than any email could, and since you're checking email at the time you make the call, you probably weren't hacking (or at least in the zone) anyway.

-Status meetings are the professional equivalent of asking "are we there yet?" for the 50th time in sweltering heat. If you get called into a status meeting more than once a week, it is time to address it as a problem. Most managers you are dealing with are only concerned about two things: what you're doing and when you expect it to be done. Get good at demonstrating what you have done. Perhaps adopt a build schedule with each build having demonstrable qualities to it rather than things a manager cannot see/measure. Having a build and demonstrating it with a statement like "I refactored all my code so it's much easier to maintain" is wonderful, except to a manager who might second-guess that you did any work at all since nothing appears to have changed for you. Similarly, get good at tracking your time. You can only do this by actually tracking how much time you spend on things. There are good tools available to accomplish this, so do it. When you go to make future estimates, they may not be precise but at least they'll be a lot more accurate than simply guessing.

-Ever had two half-hour meetings scheduled over the course of a few days? Look at opportunities to defragment your schedule. If you have two meetings with the same person, see if you can combine them into one mega-meeting. If you have a meeting one afternoon with manager A, and a meeting the next morning with manager B, call them up and see if you can re-schedule the meeting. You have the same capacity file systems (schedules), but your block size is bigger than theirs and so you have fewer of them. A measly half hour meeting will take up one gigantic block of your schedule while it will only take up a small block in theirs. Thus, from a purely statistical point of view, the chances of having them say yes to a reschedule are quite high.

-If you are on a development team, create a designated hitter of meeting attendees. Take turns being the DH. Personally, I prefer to have one week where I'm stuck in manager mode rather than having to go into manager mode once a week. You'd be surprised how often the specific programmer responsible for a piece of code is actually needed at a meeting. Often they just need a technical person's opinion, and chances are that you can assert your team members' opinions for them. When it comes to schedule estimates, you probably have a rough idea of how quickly your teammates work and when pushed for an estimate, so as not to pressure them, you will probably sandbag your estimate more than if they were to ask the same of you. So it works out better anyway because you're building contingencies into your time estimates.

 _If you have to schedule meetings:_

-Add a custom field to each business contact with their meeting time preference: "Morning", "Early Afternoon", "Late Afternoon", "Evening", etc.

-When you go to book meetings, try to book them all on one day, a task that will be made easier because you can preemptively suggest their preferred time.

 _If you run a meeting, do it well:_

-Run your meeting like the Japanese railway system. Each invite should include the length of the meeting, an agenda, and what you will accomplish by meeting.

-The day before the meeting if it is in the morning (or several hours before hand if in the afternoon), send out a revised agenda and confirmation. Who knows, you may not have to attend the meeting, but at least you'll have a nice 3 hour window ahead of you before finding out. This means the day ahead is free!

-While at the meeting, keep track of the time and keep people focussed. You don't have to be a jerk, but gently guide people back on topic when they start talking about the weather.

-After the meeting, volunteer to send out the meeting minutes. This will ensure that all next-actions/deliverables are recorded and will minimize future interruptions by email/phone/further meetings.

-Chances are that your meetings are not run like the ones above if you're simply an attendee. If you are an employee, see if you can get your boss to sit in on meetings and be your delegate. If you are in an environment that will allow you to, introduce this kind of behaviour. Too many professionals simply aren't aware of how meetings should be run, so they do things in a sloppy manner.

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Alex3917
I think the managers schedule would be better called the entrepreneurs
schedule. The reason entrepreneurs spend a few hours every day helping other
people with their projects is so that once a year they can call in 300 favors
over a six week period.

I bet most people reading this could do all of Richard Branson's job, with the
exception of about five minutes a day. The problem is that those five minutes
are where he makes millions and millions of dollars. The reason he's able to
do this is because whereas the average person knows about 200 people, he knows
more like 10,000 people on a first name basis.

Don't get me wrong, being the maker is deeply satisfying, but 9 times out of
10 being the entrepreneur is more leveraged.

~~~
kleevr
Well if you consider the "makers" magical 5 minute window of extreme insight
that he or she might have specked throughout their half-days, it appears to me
that it is just as significant as a Branson's. Branson's leverage comes mostly
from his wealth, or at least is vastly improved by his wealth by a super-
scaler factor. So a "(very) successful entrepreneur" can exert an
(exaggiteriously)-greater "leverage" by the good fortunes of their wealth --
seems almost tautological.

(For those 5 minutes of the day, the maker might as well be printing off $1000
bills -- of actual value creation, and not some monetary-network optimization,
a fish more fit to be fried by some super rich Bransonian-figure.)

~~~
Alex3917
Well right now Richard Branson's leverage comes from being Richard Branson,
but I was talking about more when he was getting started.

~~~
kleevr
Good point, I'm woefully ignorant of Branson's history of success; perhaps
I'll meander through some wiki pages today.

I did liked the notion Stephen Dubner added. Namely that the two schedule
types aren't necessarily mutual exclusive to a personality type -- some/(all)
can modally switch between them (within reason). Perhaps the Entreprenuer's
Schedule is really some personal-proprietary blend of both. (I would like to
think Branson as a "maker" on some level or another.)

~~~
gaius
He started out selling records (as in, vinyl disks that stored audio data,
crazy I know) at a market stall. That grew into a music publishing business
and a chain of high street stores. He used that as his springboard into his
other enterprises.

Stelios from Easyjet is an example of someone who made a small fortune in the
airline business... By starting with a large fortune he inherited. Branson is
a self-made man. His leverage is his mystique and his charisma.

~~~
Alex3917
"His leverage is his mystique and his charisma."

I haven't read his biographies, but I'd posit this is how it went (since this
is the order it usually goes in):

1\. RB takes on a few small projects and ships. Develops a reputation for
delivering on his promises.

2\. Uses this reputation to get money and resources for bigger projects. Meets
lots and lots of people while doing these projects.

3\. Is now seen as a leader, which makes him charismatic.

4\. Spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to employ full-time voice acting
and body language coaches, and further develops his personal brand and
mystique.

Now that all this is done, what Richard Branson does for a living is to play
Richard Branson. Do you think he actually wants to fly to Fiji and go rock
climbing every weekend? Of course not. Most weekends he'd much rather curl up
with a pot of tea and read the paper. But he can't; he has to go to Fiji,
because that's what Richard Branson would do.

~~~
gaius
Necker Island is where he goes. Any maybe he just does drink tea and read the
papers there, no-one knows, since he owns the place :-)

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jwecker
Good heavens. Reading the NYT comments I'm surprised at how many people take
issue with the choice of words- "maker" and "manager," or assume that pg was
somehow trying to degrade one or the other. Sometimes I wonder if there's a
secret contest going on somewhere on the web or something where the goal is to
get offended (on record, with full name) at the most innocuous thing possible.

I suppose it means that the main points of the essay are holding up quite
nicely, on the other hand.

~~~
chrismear
I've encountered more than a few people who take issue with the "us
programmers are special flowers, we need weird working hours and no
interruptions" line (as they see it). Everyone else gets their job done under
normal conditions; why can't the programmers? This may just be more of that.

~~~
wynand
I know that kind of person. I think every programmer does.

I don't know at which point one's value as an employee started being measured
by one's tolerance for a distracting workplace. I always thought that the idea
was to create conditions that allow for people to get as much done as
possible.

Though it might not be possible to give people the schedules and conditions
that they need all time, it is possible to improve matters a lot in most
workplaces.

------
alanthonyc
It's nice to see this essay being publicly exposed by a more mainstream news
site.

~~~
edw519
Yes. Hopefully it will bring more makers to hn and scare the managers away.

~~~
pg
I stopped linking to HN from essays several months ago. I don't want the
community to grow too fast.

~~~
robg
What's the traffic difference between your highest visited essays and HN?

I found YC and HN through your essays. I'm wondering if that's a more general
phenomenon.

~~~
pg
On an ordinary weekday, HN gets about 3x as many unique visitors as my site:
33k vs 11k. When a new essay is very popular, my traffic spikes up to 30 or
40k a day, or in rare cases over 50k.

~~~
robg
Thanks! As a comparison, how's this essay looking today? I only saw the link
because it was on the front page, but I think that's one of their most popular
blogs. Is the NY Times as powerful as claimed in PR circles?

~~~
pg
I don't know; Yahoo Store only updates stats once a day.

If I used Mixpanel (<http://mixpanel.com>) I could see stats in real time!

~~~
trefn
feel free to sign up =)

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neilk
> Having read Paul Graham’s wise words — seriously, go read it already — I
> feel somewhat less guilty about being such a jerk during my “maker” periods.

I think pg makes some excellent points, but this is also why I mistrust his
conclusions sometimes. Quite often, some dysfunction gets explained away as a
trait of being creative. Seems a bit too easy. The NYTimes writer seems to be
aware of this temptation as well.

There are lots of other reasons to hate meetings, and not all reflect so well
on the 'makers'. Many meetings just waste time, of course. But programmers
sometimes do need to be dragged to a table to commit to an estimate, make some
difficult decision, or justify their progress. None of which is pleasant.

There's a lot of empirical studies showing that interruptions are pretty
damaging to knowledge workers' productivity. I don't know of any study that
shows an hour-long meeting really has to mess up the rest of your day, or that
one cannot focus in small time increments. I know it's harder, and that I
personally find it difficult, but to me this seems to be within the scope of
human possibility. Something tells me that if it was literally a matter of
life or death, I would find some way to be useful during a three-hour window.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
The whole thing is a rather long winded way of saying that people working on
complicated technical or craft problems need hours of uninterrupted time
alone. This somewhat obvious point doesn't require pages of text.

"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" made the research backed argument 30
years ago that to progress in drawing one needs large chunks of uninterrupted
time when the linguistic centers of the brain remain unstimulated.

------
bigwill
Wow this is right on (PG and this author both). I particularly like this line
(insert "product" or "release" in place of "book" and he's nailed my
experience, particularly the gnawing part):

"A book is like a child who never naps, never goes to camp, always needs care
and feeding, and whose presence gnaws on you if you dare neglect it."

I think it also hints at something else I'm grappling with. I work a lot and
worry about what I'm working on even when I'm not working. I think this really
impedes my ability to do creative things outside of work--I'm so gnawed upon
by what I left at work that I have trouble pushing myself into working on
other projects.

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TallGuyShort
The original essay by pg: <http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

Very insightful, I enjoyed it.

