the onda

Paul Graham has a short and insightful essay on the true cost of the meeting-obssessed cultures of big companies, "Maker's schedule, Managers Schedule," where he points to the fundamental impedance mismatch in the working rhythms of engineers/creative folk and their business/managerial counterparts. The money quote:

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

After two years of drowning in meetings, I've come to my own conclusion on this topic. Unfortunately meetings are unavoidable, especially when trying to coordinate large group efforts. However, I think the following three changes could boost the productivity of every hardware/software/services company in the Fortune 1000 by 2x, and in some cases maybe even 10x:

1. Have Microsoft Exchange schedule the default meeting length at 15 minutes. Require manager authorization for scheduling meetings that last more than 30 minutes— or 60 minutes more than once per week.

2. Have all virtual collaboration systems (conference call-ins, video conferencing) time out and lock if the meeting is not started on time. Lock all new participants out 1 minute after the start of the meeting. If anyone has "computer trouble" because of not preparing early enough, lock them out of the meeting as well.

3. Have an eBay-like rating system on all meetings that participants can optionally use. If a meeting organizer gets below a certain rating threshold, require manager approval for this person scheduling any further meetings.

I'm sure people would find all sorts of creative ways to game these three rules, but over enough interactions, and with enough participants, I think the overall system would weed out a lot of the crap meetings that suck up time and interrupt the rhythm of folks in maker roles.

On the other hand, Graham doesn't consider the other giant problem affecting "makers" at work these days— the constant self-imposed interruptions to "twitter this," or "check Reddit," or IM or take a peruse through Google Reader. In some ways, these continuous partial attention helpers are more insidious as they tend to draw little bits of focus down throughout the day while not actually feeling like real interruptions.