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Very specifically, spending a lot of time rescheduling meetings suggests to me that your org may need to do a bit of soul searching about how they handle meetin

Very specifically, spending a lot of time rescheduling meetings suggests to me that your org may need to do a bit of soul searching about how they handle meetings. My specific advice is: 1. Cull meetings that are there to inform a wide group of people about general goings on. Especially regular meetings of this type. Especially especially if they're more regular than monthly. There are very few topics that need to be presented to a room of 10 people in a weekly or biweekly basis. 2. Your business should have a heartbeat of some kind, and meetings should be scheduled on the basis of this heartbeat, not in a variety of recurrence schedules. So, if you do two week sprints, for example, meetings should be ideally biweekly (as in once every two weeks, not twice a week) or quadweekly, with some tolerance for weekly. If a meeting is currently scheduled monthly, it should be replaced with quadweekly. You can somewhat tolerate quarterly meetings interfering with this schedule, but nothing more common. 3. You should be designating time bands for different kinds of meetings. A zone of time when standups happen. A zone of time when 1:1s happen. A few times that are resolutely free of meetings that want individual contributors to visit them. If you can implement these, I would not expect to have to spend a lot of time ad-hoc detangling schedules every few months. If your org resists these kinds of changes, then, well, it can be frustrating being someone charged with implementing dumb policies, for real.

asark 8y ago
So far as I can tell, most orgs have meeting problems to one degree or another. If they're on the good end they're only spending ~2x the person-hours they would if meetings were scheduled and run about as well as conceivably possible. On the worse end... sky's the limit. I think it's part of a broader problem with communication. Lots of heavy, poorly scoped tools and processes, way too many channels (in the sense of a communication channel generally, not Slack channels or something) tons and tons of look-busy chatter because people are insecure and can't figure out what to do with their time, piles of messages and emails and reports that no-one ever reads. Huge amounts of waste and down-time and frustration due to all the above. On and on and on. "Efficient" market. Maybe gross organizational inefficiency is really the best we can manage. Also it seems like every org is perpetually in the middle of trying to figure out how do store and distribute documents of all sorts. I sometimes wonder whether for most orgs the benefits of tech have even been positive, outside maybe one or two things they're really, actually leveraging well, in the best cases. This sort of organization that's totally screwed up but doesn't know, or care, and is making money regardless, is well documented back to at least the middle of the 20th century—but more technology seems to have made the inefficiency more efficient, more often than it's eliminated it.

asark 8y ago

So far as I can tell, most orgs have meeting problems to one degree or another. If they're on the good end they're only spending ~2x the person-hours they would if meetings were scheduled and run about as well as conceivably possible. On the worse end... sky's the limit. I think it's part of a broader problem with communication. Lots of heavy, poorly scoped tools and processes, way too many channels (in the sense of a communication channel generally, not Slack channels or something) tons and tons of look-busy chatter because people are insecure and can't figure out what to do with their time, piles of messages and emails and reports that no-one ever reads. Huge amounts of waste and down-time and frustration due to all the above. On and on and on. "Efficient" market. Maybe gross organizational inefficiency is really the best we can manage. Also it seems like every org is perpetually in the middle of trying to figure out how do store and distribute documents of all sorts. I sometimes wonder whether for most orgs the benefits of tech have even been positive, outside maybe one or two things they're really, actually leveraging well, in the best cases. This sort of organization that's totally screwed up but doesn't know, or care, and is making money regardless, is well documented back to at least the middle of the 20th century—but more technology seems to have made the inefficiency more efficient, more often than it's eliminated it.