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The remainder are not mine, forced to assist. Mostly 60 mins each. I try to join via Skype from my desk and shoot emails while people drone on.
My tip: never give more than 45 mins in your schedule. Your reports will focus more and you can use those 15 mins to take notes, to-dos
Meetings themselves aren't so bad, but when I was a manager, our meetings would require a half hour drive somewhere, or going up to the 40th floor of some building, preparing slides, charts, and so on. Sometimes you need to bring in an expert/consultant/trainer and brief her on the project prior to the meeting.
Most of the work is around those meetings. You can have 20 hours of meetings scheduled per week, and that translates to 30-40 hours of time blocked off and 10-20 more hours of writing reports, updating Jira, answering emails, taking screenshots, and so on. If you've got a remote team, that's even more workload.
The longest meeting we've had was about 3 days long, 9-5 straight UI/UX workshop. The client balked at this at first - they have their share of meetings already, but afterwards everyone agreed it was 100% worth it. It was the only way to get a lot of stakeholders in the room, and it killed a lot of assumptions - we had UX requests that were not technically possible, UX that didn't fit user behavior, underestimated the robustness of some hacks that a dev/now engineering manager made 3 years ago, and so on.
Example report here: https://app.shepherd.com/personal-report/sample
If you get a chance to look let me know what you think!
We hope to have the report on how it looks big picture in maybe 2 or 3 months. I'll post on Show HN when its done.
We believe in that most of things can be communicated asynchronously. For those things that strictly need to be address synchronously we keep those too slots in the week.
I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc). I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fr…
It was a remote development job with lots of meetings:
-1 hour standups daily -twice per week, 3 hour planning meetings on top of the daily standup -Friday we had a 'watercooler' meeting for an hour after the standup, where we were supposed to 'tell jokes' or 'share a funny story'. Since most of the developers were overseas and from different countries/cultural backgrounds, it usually ended up being very awkward. -twice/month we had a 4+ hour big-picture meeting on top of the daily standup
Sometimes, I would bill over half my weekly hours as meetings.
The strange part is that with all of these meetings, the tickets that would be assigned to me would be vague or filled with missing information. Even when I would have a 1-1 call with the boss to explain the ticket, she would talk in circles and could never give me the exact information I needed.
When I completed the ticket and didn't read her mind, things would have to be re-written.
I was eventually replaced by an overseas worker from India (the boss told me I was too expensive and she could hire someone from India for much less) and the company lost most of its investors within a few years.
I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc). I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fr…
I calendar my desk time for this reason
Enterprise Architect: 11 mandatory hours this week, and a number of regular meetings have been canceled. Optional meetings amount to around 7 hours this week; pretty light. At my busiest, it is closer to 30 hours a week, and my longest regular meeting is a quarterly planning offsite that's ~3x 8 hour days. EDIT: I can't say that I resent any of these, since they're simply a part of the job. My role has a component th…