Meetings are forcing functions

You're waiting a whole week for an update or to push people.

I'm a huge proponent of "async over sync" and "sync as soon as necessary". Don't wait to the next meeting in 3 days to escalate.

People whose calendar looks like meetings only and are always willing and able to throw complexity to others won't feel the pain of not having a meeting budget [1] but other roles will want to avoid eating up all their time on this type of admin.

I encourage people to explore how extremely simple Agent Skills workflows can already do a lot of the admin legwork than an executive assistant would and free their time from admin bureocracy and red tape, as much as possible. If there's no programmatic endpoint or MCP, use something like playwright. A little goes a long way.

- [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/meeting-budget.html

The problem is that management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting. It doesn't take long until the meeting is no longer short, switches up to daily, isn't standing because there's too many people and/or everyone is WFH.

I think one of the biggest problems in management is that managers are super focused on making their management tasks easier at the expense of their reports actually doing the work. In general, they prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that now every engineer has an hour less time to do actual work, they've been taken out of their flow state to attend an hour long meeting of which maybe 2 or 3 minutes is relevant to them, and they've tuned out of everyone else's progress reports because it doesn't impact them at all. Management simply don't see that 16% of the productive day for the entire team is wasted, because it's made their job marginally more efficient.

I've worked in exactly one place were the standups literally were a small group of engineers and one PM, and it was literally "I'm working on this, no problems" or "I hit this issue, I'd like to chat to X about it after the meeting" and the entire thing was over in 2-3 minutes - nobody sat down because there was literally no point. In that company, the manager would just catch up with each personal individually to find out what everyone was up to, taking maybe a minute or 2 each day AND after checking whether they were in the zone or happy to be distracted. In that place, once every 2 weeks we'd also have an hour scheduled 1-to-1 about anything the manager or report wanted to discuss about non-project things, but that could end early if nobody had anything else they wanted to discuss.

> Every leader ever: if we could do the right work, we could have less meetings.

Guess who defined “work” in the first place? I wonder if it’s some kind of manager schizophrenia where they define shitty requirements and outcomes and then act surprised when they get subpar result, which they try to promptly mitigate with more meetings.