If you’ve read very far on this site, you’ll know I despise meetings. Horribly. I view meetings as a productivity sink; there’s no way I can be more productive in a meeting, and, many times, I am completely unproductive in a meeting.  I would hear people talking about their day being fully booked — and are excited about it! I couldn’t grasp why someone would be excited about it. These same people believe there isn’t a single problem a meeting can’t solve, when, in my mind, meetings only create problems.  Why are my observations about meetings so disjointed with these other people.  Is there something wrong with me? With them?  The answer is “neither.”

The “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” eureka! moment made me realize that there are two distinctly different types of people when it comes to meetings.  Worse, neither side understands the other. Nor do they try.

In order for makers to help managers understand, we must communicate with them. We must let them know how a single meeting could potentially ruin an entire day. Hopefully you can find a manager that has, hopefully recently, been a maker. They will become your champion. Remind them of the joy of a meeting-less day and how much they were able to get done, and that satisfaction that provided.

You’re not going to be able to get out of all meetings, unfortunately.  There are two things that can be done to assist in your goal of unfettered making time: 1) Minimize your meetings, and 2) Coalesce your meetings.

Minimize your meetings

Minimize both the number and length of meetings. Ask if you really need to be in the meeting, and explain the benefits of what you’ll be able to accomplish if you don’t attend. Do not fall into the trap of the default hour meeting time. Challenge the meeting organizer to reduce a meeting down to 30 minutes, or to 45 if that doesn’t work. Just because your meeting software defaults to hour-long meetings doesn’t mean you have to follow their cue.

Coalesce your meetings

Think of your calendar as a hard disk defragger display. Get the meetings to all form consecutive blocks such that you don’t have an hour meeting, an hour break, and then another hour of meeting.  That hour break in the middle is useless because you’re not going to be able to really get up to speed before you need to start slowing down for the next meeting. Hopefully you can coalesce all your meetings together in the morning, so you’ll have a wide-open afternoon to work. (Or maybe that’s just me; I wouldn’t like my prospects for the day if I knew my entire afternoon was filled with meetings.)

Move meetings to natural boundaries, such as the hour before or after lunch. If I know there’s a meeting scheduled at 2, I’ll postpone my lunch until 1:15 or so. Don’t allow a meeting to fall right in the middle of your morning or afternoon. However, do not try to create a designated “meeting zone” during the day. Some managers will think all available time within that block of time will need to be filled with meetings. Instead, create a “do not meet” time in which meetings cannot be scheduled, allowing the makers to make and the managers to plan their next batch of  meetings.

Understanding the manager mindset

Managers usually schedule meetings to get information of one type or another. Here are a few quick ideas to provide information without having a meeting, to shorten meetings, or to get uninvited to meetings.

Suggest an alternative to a meeting. For example, if you’re asked if you’re going to be free for a meeting, respond by asking to talk about it now. Without the formality of the meeting, and the inclusion of  unnecessary people (who tend to elongate the meeting), you’ll spend less time addressing the issue.

Try a preemptive strike. If you’re scheduled for a meeting, and you see only one issue for you during the meeting (you only attend meetings with an agenda, right?), go directly to the meeting owner’s office/cube, and give them the information they need, then excuse yourself from the meeting. Follow up with an email to all the invitees.

Do not attend a meeting without an agenda. As mentioned above, you should never go to a meeting that doesn’t have a published agenda. Without it, how do you know when you’ve answered the organizer’s questions, or fulfilled their need to know? By balking at attending an agenda-less meeting, you’re actually helping the manager get in the habit of creating agendas, which will be a win for everyone.  Once you have the agenda, become an agenda hawk. If conversation goes off topic, bring attention to it and get the meeting back on course, even if it’s not your meeting.

If all else fails, become a pain in the ass. If you’re continually getting invites to unproductive meetings from a single individual, it might become necessary to go negative. Start coming up with action items for the manager, forcing them to look through the eyes of a maker for a bit. Go medieval on the meeting’s ass by being a stickler for starting and ending times, and for sticking to the agenda (see above).

Hopefully with these ideas, your meetings will become less frequent, and those you still have will be less of a waste of time.

This isn’t just about the interruption taking a minute —because rarely is that true— but it’s about the time it takes for you and your brain to recover and get back into the mindset you were in prior to the interruption. A study printed in the New York Times that used Microsoft employees as a sample set showed that it took, on average, an employee 15 minutes to recover from even the most trivial of interruptions, such as an email notification.

I have known this for quite a while from my own experience, but I believe that the estimate might be a bit on the conservative side. The reason for this is that an interruption, regardless of its length or importance, destroys your concentration. The people in this study weren’t just folks off the street, but were the well trained and intelligent folks at Microsoft, so I believe the recovery time could very well be longer for most people. Additionally, I would think that the difficultly of the work in progress has an impact upon the recovery time as well, and would not be surprised that it could take as long as 30 minutes to recover from an interruption to a difficult task.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say the person approaching you for a minute of your time really does need only a minute, and the recovery time for an interruption is 15 minutes. The total cost of that interruption to you, in terms of productivity, would be around 16 minutes, and possibly longer depending upon the difficulty of the interrupted task.

Mark McGuiness describes the reasoning behind this as a memory retention issue. Your memory is dependent upon your mind’s state; when your focus changes, as what happens when being interrupted, your mind’s state changes, and you lose a bit of the memory of the task you were working on prior to the interruption. The example he gives is one in which we’ve all participated: being interrupted in a conversation, then, post-interruption, on person asks the other “what were we talking about?”

Now, what to do about this? Banish all interruptions? Do that, and business as we know it would collapse (yes, even more than it’s already collapsed this year). Most interruptions are necessary, and the people doing the interrupting usually aren’t doing so to break other people’s concentration. There are questions to be asked and answered, but there are some interruptions that just must be told “no.” So the answer to what to do about this is something I’ll be writing about over the next couple weeks, using three different scenarios. Next will be a topic near and dear to my heart, meetings, and in specific that most evil villain the “Status Meeting”. Following that, I’ll have entries for breaks, and how to take them, and then interruptions in general.

Photo by: TW Collins

References:

• Avoid the ‘Sisyphus Effect’ of Endless To-do Lists
• Interruptions
• Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had some sort of news portal as my start page. Back in the day, it was a Yahoo! page, and more recently it was a Google page personalized with several news and RSS feeds. It didn’t contain “fluff” like comics or a joke of the day; instead, it was local news headlines, finance stuff and a few tech RSS feeds. But often, too often, I would see a tantalizing headline or link that would divert my attention from the task at hand.

The worst type of distraction would be when I had a really good idea about how to fix a nagging defect or a way to make a page’s layout flow easier, only to forget what it was after getting five minutes deep into the latest breaking news story. Not only did I lose the five minutes I spent reading the story, I lost the incalculable amount of time it took to remember what it was I was thinking of earlier.

Then one day, just after a Firefox upgrade, it dawned on me: Get rid of the start page. After Firefox is updated, it shows a splash screen telling you about the update. Your normal start page is opened in another tab, but it was hidden by the splash. Since I wasn’t bombarded by Google’s personalized start page, I had no opportunity to lose focus. The answer was clear: don’t use Google’s personalized start page.

I then started thinking of a “proper” start page. Perhaps the home page for my site? No, a single out-of-place pixel would eventually start screaming at me to fix it, causing the same problems as the Google start page. I started thinking about posting a blank page to my site, and point to that, but that triggered something from my memory. Blank.

Both Firefox and IE have a special page called ‘about:blank’ that displays, as you might have guessed, a blank page. I set my home page to be about:blank, and now I’m greeted by a blank page that has no content whatsoever to steal my time. It doesn’t even hit a server.

The fact that about:blank doesn’t hit a server reveals a pleasant side-effect: starting the browser is now quicker. Granted, it’s not showing anything, and to get to where I want to go I have to select a bookmark, do a search or enter something in the address bar, which takes a bit more time. But it’s the page I want to see, and without distraction.

To set Firefox to open with a blank page, go to the Tools menu and select “Options…”. If it’s not already selected, click on the “Main” icon. In the dropdown labeled “When Firefox Starts”, select “Show a blank page”. Doing this allows you still set a certain page as your home page, allowing quick access by hitting Alt+Home.

The instructions are similar for IE. Select “Internet Options” from the Tools menu (or from the Control Panel), and click the ‘Use Blank’ button.