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Having a Maker's responsibilities on a Manager's schedule

This is a great summary of the Problem with Meetings.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.
...
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

By no means do i consider myself to be a Maker of anything significant, but i am responsible for "making things" (writing documentation for consumption by developers, specifically). And yet i'm high enough up on the org chart that i'm needed in "Manager" meetings. Lots of them. Which pretty much makes making things impossible. Sure, if you look at my calendar you might find enough time, usually in half hour intervals, that are technically sufficient for me to complete my "alone time" tasks. But as the quoted piece says, there's no way to write a document that should take four hours in eight half hour increments. Or at least, there's no way to write it well. Oh, i'll get it done. But it'll be mundane and uninspired and lacking in any of the Excellence that my company's Core Values statement says is so important. Rushing to get stuff done in tiny chunks sure makes it hard to give a crap.

My favorite is when a meeting ends early (a rarity) and the meeting organizer says, "Well, looks like i'm 'giving back' 15 minutes!". Sure. But i'm using those 15 minutes to stare sullenly at my RSS feed.

Anyway, i guess it's nice to see i'm not alone.

By fnord12 | June 21, 2012, 4:50 PM | My stupid life