During my career I've spent a lot of time resisting and rejecting the overhead of time spent reporting what I'm working on and to some degree careful planning for the future. Like a lot of programmers, it only takes one or two short meetings a week before I feel like it's too much and meetings are a massive waste of time.
My first real job coding CG effects at DreamWorks, I got a black mark in my personnel file in my first 6 months for complaining about being asked to show my progress once or twice a day. It was during a 3-4 week coding project, and it took about and hour to prepare for dailies, so it seemed to me like I was being asked to sacrifice 25% of my productivity, to the detriment of both me and the company.
A few years later I'd been working on a shot for a month, thought it was exactly what they had described, and pretty good and close to done. But it kept not being finaled. Three months later when the director approved it, I looked back at what I thought was near done month 1, and it was crap. I realized that we sit in meetings and describe in articulate detail what we want to achieve for hours, everyone agrees vigorously, and people still walk out of the room having completely different ideas. I realized I need the overhead for course corrections for what I'm doing -- I will veer too far away from what others want without fairly continuous feedback. After seeing that in myself, I see it everywhere with others, programmers working too long by themselves will make what they want and not what the team needs.
Communication is what I want to improve. Not more of it, but how can we make it better?
I also wish I'd gotten out of C++ and into web earlier. ;)