Another factor here is lots of pointless meetings, especially ones that rehash status or repeat status when there are no updates, are especially demotivating.

Another factor here is lots of pointless meetings, especially ones that rehash status or repeat status when there are no updates, are especially demotivating. Design meetings, one can live for, if one is interested in how to solve a problem. Killing the design meetings is probably something to be avoided. The zone exists, to an extent. I sometimes think there are parallels to something like videogame-esque canon that takes a long time to charge up. The best work I'm going to do is going to come at some random hour during the day, and if I'm interrupted, the charge counter is likely to reset. But maybe not. I'm sort of interrupt driven at times, and I think our culture being very triggered by email, phones, other things, can cause people to wait for interruptions to do things too. So there's a balance. But yes, pointless meetings are bad things. But it's ugly when there are meetings you have to have, and there's a backlash against the manager calling the meeting, because then "the manager is something different", and I think there's a bit of negative legacy to this article in that vein. Really, I think the question is to ask, at the end of whatever meetings, how much value did you get out of it, and what actionable conclusions came out of that meeting. If the meeting doesn't produce action items (that hopefully get done before the next meeting of the same kind), it's not a good meeting. And meetings are really about getting people together that need to talk about something. If it's not that, then don't do it :) Make sure everybody's time in there is valuable. If you have a meeting where somebody only talks for thirty seconds out of an hour, it's probably not worth that person's time. However, it's also destructive to think a meeting isn't worth someone's time, and use that to "protect" their time. Everybody should get to be involved in some decision making that wants to be. Do I find that in technical-manager-mode I can't code very well because I'm too distracted by 1000 different things? Yes, pretty much. And one of the first things I do is try to cut the B.S. management meetings and make sure the ones I'm involved in is important. If you can't cut that, it's frustrating. But the complexity of having more people means conversations to organize things do have to happen, and to crush them in the spirit of "meetings are bad" can be dangerous too. I think that's wrong. Again, the important part is to have the right meetings. If you can block them out to happen during major blocks of time just a few days a week - most of the time - I think that's great.