5 ms·

Fake Meetings for People with Too Many Real Meetings

94 points by nottombrown 11y ago

jldugger 11y ago
How toxic is the work place that you can't block out time for Actually Working on your calendar?
- bane 11y ago
  It gets pretty crazy when you move into middle/upper management and your day gets consumed by meetings with teams waiting for you to make a decisive decision about some minor point of conflict. It gets worse the more people end up under your hierarchy and delegation becomes a major priority. But then your life is consumed by synchronization meetings so you know what your delegates have been doing on your behalf and can answer for them/find connections and opportunities across delegates.
  - RealityVoid 11y ago
    So you become a human kernel: scheduling, handling resources, resolving conflicts, starting processes, synchronizing.
- jabagonuts 11y ago
  Sadly, working on your calendar is non-capitalizable, so you are frowned upon for doing it on company time.
  - eru 11y ago
    I think jldugger means you block out time on your calendar for `Actually Working'.
rdl 11y ago
I do this and also take advantage of the chance to take a conference room for an hour or two, vs. open plan desk with my back to a room full of people. I get probably 5x more done per minute in the conference room.
- mxuribe 11y ago
  During a previous job when I had a more manageable workload, I actually enjoyed the open plan desk. The interaction with my peers, co-workers etc. was actually helpful - if not always for productivity - at least for ideas, general sanity checks, etc. And then i got my current job, and the workload is just crazy...so any tiny interruption kills my productivity...So i do similar to what you do: block some time in a conference room, an hour or two at most. I happen to book a conference room on the other side of the building, where most folks don't recognize me. But i always have mixed feelings about it. While maybe i am not getting 5x more done, i'm definitely loads more productive. But to me it seems sad, and says alot about how crappy some jobs can be, when to get anything done, you actually have to work away from your desk and peers. Ah well...
  - rdl 11y ago
    I think the trick is either to work from multiple locations (based on task), or to have a reconfigurable space. In my next office, I am going to do a team-based pod system. Teams of 4-8. Single large room to start (2k SF or so), broken up however they decide (could be one huge room, or individual offices, or some combination, or smaller offices plus one big room, etc) The thing I really want to try is offices with openable walls on 2-3 sides. One side opening into a shared team room; the other opening into a hallway or open plan space. (The other trick is doing this somewhere with <$24/mo per SF real estate.)
- aidenn0 11y ago
  I briefly had to work with my back to people; it really is the most distracting situation to be in.
krithix 11y ago
for those of us who don't want to connect our calendar right off the bat, what are some example meetings this creates?
- nottombrown 11y ago
  It adds important things like: "Review OKRs", "Planning sync", etc. https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xizuaap0lbjt0k/Screenshot%202016-03-29%2018.05.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xizuaap0lbjt0k/Screenshot%202016-...
  - krithix 11y ago
    nice! :D
takno 11y ago
Adding fake meetings is an easy and effective thing to do. Honestly can't see what value a service adds here
bane 11y ago
A technique I learned years ago once Outlook starting broadcasting availability is the notion of "defensive scheduling". Basically schedule work time the same as you treat any other meeting. If a meeting request comes in and it conflicts with your previously scheduled work time? Decline. I've used it pretty successfully, but it requires a little bit of discipline to make sure you have scheduled yourself out a few weeks in advance and that you don't start accepting meetings during that time. (note: some people will figure out what you're doing when you have 6 hour blocks of time every Thursday. Schedule lots of smaller 30minute and 1hour meetings and people trying to invade your calendar won't know the difference)
Ologn 11y ago
I used to block off every 9AM-10AM, 4PM-5PM and 1PM-2PM slot as busy slots. If someone really needed to have a meeting at one of those times they could ask me. Because often, those were the only slots the 10 people in the meeting all had open in the immediate future so people would then schedule meetings at those times. I grew tired of 4PM-5PM meetings which extended to 5:30PM, 6PM etc.
- deepfriedtech 11y ago
  I'm one of those people that leave work at 5, even if there is a meeting going. My wife and children are far more important than helping someone make more money. My boss knows I don't work nights or weekends. I routinely ignore night and weekend emails because when I leave work I'm "unemployed" as it were until the next work day. Once you set the precedent, word gets around. No one asks me for anything other than to do my job. I've been doing this for years. Besides, I have toddlers at home as well as teenager. My wife is knackered by the time I roll in, so I get home as soon as possible to help out.
deepfriedtech 11y ago
I loathe meetings and do my best to avoid attending them unless there is a specific technical issue being discussed that falls within my wheelhouse. I especially dislike meetings with non-technical people present. To have to stop the meeting constantly to explain things is annoying, so I ask to be excused unless my area of expertise is involved. A later walk-to-the-local-cafe-for-espresso with my supervisor gives me anything I need to know without the lame questions and hand-holding. There is a reason I ask to be in the server room with the lights out...
- mturmon 11y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but as you probably know, one must be careful not to take it too far. Metaphorically, one of these days, the server room you're shut up in might be outsourced to the cloud, and you weren't at the meeting. More concretely, by saying "no" to these meetings, a person is advertising that there are some standard capabilities that they don't have (e.g., "not skilled at working with non-technical people" appearing on an evaluation at some point). This will limit the kind of roles that person will be able to fill. What seems like a strength from one angle ("deeply technical") can look like a liability from above. (Not a down voter, BTW, just have some personal experience with the problem.)
  - eru 11y ago
    Decline most meetings, not all.
memnips 11y ago
Once I connected my calendar I actually had trouble distinguishing my real meetings from the decoy meetings. Impressive and frightening.
- christinac 11y ago
  :)
lostcolony 11y ago
I have a recurring "Developer meeting", with some of the other devs every day at 12-1 because I was so tired of having the management types, having filled the rest of their calendars with useless meetings, deciding to schedule me for useless meetings that prevented me from getting lunch (as in, Monday, Tuesday is wide open, then Tuesday morning, bam, meeting invites from 10:30 until 2:30, no breaks). That, and responding to every meeting with "tentative", so that I'm free to re-evaluate the meeting's priority against real work up until the last possible second, has allowed me to keep my sanity in a culture of time wasting.
- AstroJetson 11y ago
  People where I work try to book meetings across lunch on a regular basis. I'll get the invite and ask "are you bringing food?" No food and I'm not showing up. I did have one smart person slide a pack of crackers across the table at me. As I ate them I was declining every meeting with them for the next month. That solved that problem.
smegel 11y ago
I have a strangely recurring meeting from 11.30AM through 1PM every day - don't you dare try and arrange a meeting in my lunch hour!
gregpilling 11y ago
I do this manually already. Doesn't everyone else? My Monday morning meetings are always booked, as are my Friday afternoon meetings.
sas 11y ago
Baha — amazing! Love the idea of calendar decoys.
yesimahuman 11y ago
Genius. Debating whether to go with it or not. Awesome idea!
- christinac 11y ago
  thanks! if you do try it out, we make it easy to get rid of the cal events if you like – so, we hope, you won't be stuck with more decoys than you wanted.
Spearchucker 11y ago
This is one of those things I just assumed everybody did. I've been doing it for years, and can't imagine keeping my sanity if I didn't.
lolc 11y ago
Bwahaha cynical me really likes that. It's sad that adding a calendar item of "Working - do not disturb" is not considered an option but cramming bullshit into your calendar is.
- eru 11y ago
  Have you actually tried "Working - do not disturb"?
bunderbunder 11y ago
I picked up the habit of doing this manually a couple years ago, when my meeting load mushroomed following a reorg. I also started getting assertive about declining meetings if I thought they were asking for too much time. Too many folks were in the habit of reflexively blocking out a full hour for a decision that could be made in 15 minutes plus a briefing email that everyone could be expected to read ahead of time. I was surprised to find that that one didn't really burn any social capital. Far from being offended, many of my colleagues thought it was a good idea and started following suit.
- smoyer 11y ago
  +10 to event you said bit I have a couple more tips. 1) If it's not clear what the meeting is for and there's no agenda - just decline it. 2) If there are too many people invited - say no. So often there's really only about 1.5 people on the room who you really need.
  - matwood 11y ago
    > 1) If it's not clear what the meeting is for and there's no agenda - just decline it. This is probably the best advice. Meetings should only be about hashing out the final details that might have had some contention. Start all conversations on email/slack and only meet when it becomes needed.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I loathe meetings like everyone else (nothing like being an academic to help develop a hatred of meetings and committees). I have often thought that it would be great to limit the amount of meetings any person could organise on a monthly basis via some quota (say 6 hours a month). Everyone who wanted to organise a meeting over some trivia would then be forced to think twice - do I really need a meeting for this?
  - eru 11y ago
    Make people bid for your limited meeting time!
sulam 11y ago
I do this all the time manually, but it's not hard or time-consuming. Why would I want this service trying to do it? It takes me maybe 5 minutes to block out the portions of my week that I don't want people to schedule over. (Of course, they still schedule over it. But they also schedule over real meetings, so I don't think there's some magical way to name a meeting that makes it seem important enough that the meeting locusts won't try and eat more hours than you have in a day.)
- restlessmedia 11y ago
  I thought exactly the same, I've always blocked out my lunch (recurring) for the gym which is trivial to set-up. The rest can be ad-hoc depending on how much of my time I need to put off limits.
xirdstl 11y ago
I'm fortunate in that I work from home a couple days a week regularly. Generally, people will wait until I'm in the office to schedule meetings, giving me those full glorious days to get things done.
nevon 11y ago
I've been thinking about how to build exactly this over the past few weeks. Awesome!
breerly 11y ago
Just tried it - unfortunately it doesn't disable the meeting notifications so once you fill up your calendar with decoy meetings you get alerted all day :(

94 points by nottombrown 11y ago

jldugger 11y ago

How toxic is the work place that you can't block out time for Actually Working on your calendar?

bane 11y ago
It gets pretty crazy when you move into middle/upper management and your day gets consumed by meetings with teams waiting for you to make a decisive decision about some minor point of conflict. It gets worse the more people end up under your hierarchy and delegation becomes a major priority. But then your life is consumed by synchronization meetings so you know what your delegates have been doing on your behalf and can answer for them/find connections and opportunities across delegates.
- RealityVoid 11y ago
  So you become a human kernel: scheduling, handling resources, resolving conflicts, starting processes, synchronizing.
jabagonuts 11y ago
Sadly, working on your calendar is non-capitalizable, so you are frowned upon for doing it on company time.
- eru 11y ago
  I think jldugger means you block out time on your calendar for `Actually Working'.

rdl 11y ago

I do this and also take advantage of the chance to take a conference room for an hour or two, vs. open plan desk with my back to a room full of people. I get probably 5x more done per minute in the conference room.

mxuribe 11y ago
During a previous job when I had a more manageable workload, I actually enjoyed the open plan desk. The interaction with my peers, co-workers etc. was actually helpful - if not always for productivity - at least for ideas, general sanity checks, etc. And then i got my current job, and the workload is just crazy...so any tiny interruption kills my productivity...So i do similar to what you do: block some time in a conference room, an hour or two at most. I happen to book a conference room on the other side of the building, where most folks don't recognize me. But i always have mixed feelings about it. While maybe i am not getting 5x more done, i'm definitely loads more productive. But to me it seems sad, and says alot about how crappy some jobs can be, when to get anything done, you actually have to work away from your desk and peers. Ah well...
- rdl 11y ago
  I think the trick is either to work from multiple locations (based on task), or to have a reconfigurable space. In my next office, I am going to do a team-based pod system. Teams of 4-8. Single large room to start (2k SF or so), broken up however they decide (could be one huge room, or individual offices, or some combination, or smaller offices plus one big room, etc) The thing I really want to try is offices with openable walls on 2-3 sides. One side opening into a shared team room; the other opening into a hallway or open plan space. (The other trick is doing this somewhere with <$24/mo per SF real estate.)
aidenn0 11y ago
I briefly had to work with my back to people; it really is the most distracting situation to be in.

krithix 11y ago

for those of us who don't want to connect our calendar right off the bat, what are some example meetings this creates?

nottombrown 11y ago
It adds important things like: "Review OKRs", "Planning sync", etc. https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xizuaap0lbjt0k/Screenshot%202016-03-29%2018.05.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/7xizuaap0lbjt0k/Screenshot%202016-...
- krithix 11y ago
  nice! :D

takno 11y ago

Adding fake meetings is an easy and effective thing to do. Honestly can't see what value a service adds here

bane 11y ago

A technique I learned years ago once Outlook starting broadcasting availability is the notion of "defensive scheduling". Basically schedule work time the same as you treat any other meeting. If a meeting request comes in and it conflicts with your previously scheduled work time? Decline. I've used it pretty successfully, but it requires a little bit of discipline to make sure you have scheduled yourself out a few weeks in advance and that you don't start accepting meetings during that time. (note: some people will figure out what you're doing when you have 6 hour blocks of time every Thursday. Schedule lots of smaller 30minute and 1hour meetings and people trying to invade your calendar won't know the difference)

Ologn 11y ago

I used to block off every 9AM-10AM, 4PM-5PM and 1PM-2PM slot as busy slots. If someone really needed to have a meeting at one of those times they could ask me. Because often, those were the only slots the 10 people in the meeting all had open in the immediate future so people would then schedule meetings at those times. I grew tired of 4PM-5PM meetings which extended to 5:30PM, 6PM etc.

deepfriedtech 11y ago
I'm one of those people that leave work at 5, even if there is a meeting going. My wife and children are far more important than helping someone make more money. My boss knows I don't work nights or weekends. I routinely ignore night and weekend emails because when I leave work I'm "unemployed" as it were until the next work day. Once you set the precedent, word gets around. No one asks me for anything other than to do my job. I've been doing this for years. Besides, I have toddlers at home as well as teenager. My wife is knackered by the time I roll in, so I get home as soon as possible to help out.

deepfriedtech 11y ago

I loathe meetings and do my best to avoid attending them unless there is a specific technical issue being discussed that falls within my wheelhouse. I especially dislike meetings with non-technical people present. To have to stop the meeting constantly to explain things is annoying, so I ask to be excused unless my area of expertise is involved. A later walk-to-the-local-cafe-for-espresso with my supervisor gives me anything I need to know without the lame questions and hand-holding. There is a reason I ask to be in the server room with the lights out...

mturmon 11y ago
I get where you're coming from, but as you probably know, one must be careful not to take it too far. Metaphorically, one of these days, the server room you're shut up in might be outsourced to the cloud, and you weren't at the meeting. More concretely, by saying "no" to these meetings, a person is advertising that there are some standard capabilities that they don't have (e.g., "not skilled at working with non-technical people" appearing on an evaluation at some point). This will limit the kind of roles that person will be able to fill. What seems like a strength from one angle ("deeply technical") can look like a liability from above. (Not a down voter, BTW, just have some personal experience with the problem.)
- eru 11y ago
  Decline most meetings, not all.

memnips 11y ago

Once I connected my calendar I actually had trouble distinguishing my real meetings from the decoy meetings. Impressive and frightening.

christinac 11y ago
:)

lostcolony 11y ago

I have a recurring "Developer meeting", with some of the other devs every day at 12-1 because I was so tired of having the management types, having filled the rest of their calendars with useless meetings, deciding to schedule me for useless meetings that prevented me from getting lunch (as in, Monday, Tuesday is wide open, then Tuesday morning, bam, meeting invites from 10:30 until 2:30, no breaks). That, and responding to every meeting with "tentative", so that I'm free to re-evaluate the meeting's priority against real work up until the last possible second, has allowed me to keep my sanity in a culture of time wasting.

AstroJetson 11y ago
People where I work try to book meetings across lunch on a regular basis. I'll get the invite and ask "are you bringing food?" No food and I'm not showing up. I did have one smart person slide a pack of crackers across the table at me. As I ate them I was declining every meeting with them for the next month. That solved that problem.

smegel 11y ago

I have a strangely recurring meeting from 11.30AM through 1PM every day - don't you dare try and arrange a meeting in my lunch hour!

gregpilling 11y ago

I do this manually already. Doesn't everyone else? My Monday morning meetings are always booked, as are my Friday afternoon meetings.

sas 11y ago

Baha — amazing! Love the idea of calendar decoys.

yesimahuman 11y ago

Genius. Debating whether to go with it or not. Awesome idea!

christinac 11y ago
thanks! if you do try it out, we make it easy to get rid of the cal events if you like – so, we hope, you won't be stuck with more decoys than you wanted.

Spearchucker 11y ago

This is one of those things I just assumed everybody did. I've been doing it for years, and can't imagine keeping my sanity if I didn't.

lolc 11y ago

Bwahaha cynical me really likes that. It's sad that adding a calendar item of "Working - do not disturb" is not considered an option but cramming bullshit into your calendar is.

eru 11y ago
Have you actually tried "Working - do not disturb"?

bunderbunder 11y ago

I picked up the habit of doing this manually a couple years ago, when my meeting load mushroomed following a reorg. I also started getting assertive about declining meetings if I thought they were asking for too much time. Too many folks were in the habit of reflexively blocking out a full hour for a decision that could be made in 15 minutes plus a briefing email that everyone could be expected to read ahead of time. I was surprised to find that that one didn't really burn any social capital. Far from being offended, many of my colleagues thought it was a good idea and started following suit.

smoyer 11y ago
+10 to event you said bit I have a couple more tips. 1) If it's not clear what the meeting is for and there's no agenda - just decline it. 2) If there are too many people invited - say no. So often there's really only about 1.5 people on the room who you really need.
- matwood 11y ago
  > 1) If it's not clear what the meeting is for and there's no agenda - just decline it. This is probably the best advice. Meetings should only be about hashing out the final details that might have had some contention. Start all conversations on email/slack and only meet when it becomes needed.
danieltillett 11y ago
I loathe meetings like everyone else (nothing like being an academic to help develop a hatred of meetings and committees). I have often thought that it would be great to limit the amount of meetings any person could organise on a monthly basis via some quota (say 6 hours a month). Everyone who wanted to organise a meeting over some trivia would then be forced to think twice - do I really need a meeting for this?
- eru 11y ago
  Make people bid for your limited meeting time!

sulam 11y ago

I do this all the time manually, but it's not hard or time-consuming. Why would I want this service trying to do it? It takes me maybe 5 minutes to block out the portions of my week that I don't want people to schedule over. (Of course, they still schedule over it. But they also schedule over real meetings, so I don't think there's some magical way to name a meeting that makes it seem important enough that the meeting locusts won't try and eat more hours than you have in a day.)

restlessmedia 11y ago
I thought exactly the same, I've always blocked out my lunch (recurring) for the gym which is trivial to set-up. The rest can be ad-hoc depending on how much of my time I need to put off limits.

xirdstl 11y ago

I'm fortunate in that I work from home a couple days a week regularly. Generally, people will wait until I'm in the office to schedule meetings, giving me those full glorious days to get things done.

nevon 11y ago

I've been thinking about how to build exactly this over the past few weeks. Awesome!

breerly 11y ago

Just tried it - unfortunately it doesn't disable the meeting notifications so once you fill up your calendar with decoy meetings you get alerted all day :(