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I gotta say, while I appreciate the sentiment, and outside of all the valid criticism laid on this by other commenters, does anyone else not notice that their "

I gotta say, while I appreciate the sentiment, and outside of all the valid criticism laid on this by other commenters, does anyone else not notice that their "after" picture is NO BETTER than the "before" picture...? They just made bigger black boxes over multiple meetings rather than on each individual meeting, and their "work time" was still scheduled over. I feel like maybe they didn't do a great job on this, or should have like...at least faked a good result on their calendar...

cjf101 6y ago
I'm not saying the writer's workplace has a meeting problem, but there's a thing that happens at orgs that do have a meeting problem. It becomes normal to double book people, because you can never find a timeslot where someone doesn't have a meeting. It can also become known that you book focus time, and so people just ignore that you are busy, and book you in. It's also possible that once you are considered fairly respected that people trust you to decide what meetings you will attend. IMO, Anyone with a calendar like the one in the article should start with a conversation with leaders at the company. This is massively bad for productivity if you doing anything remotely knowledge work related. Booking focus blocks is a bit of a last resort. The problem isn't the calendar, it's the people and processes in the workplace.
contravariant 6y ago
Not only that I'm also somewhat shocked by the combination of their claim that they do work in 10pm to 1 am (which is bad enough on its own) and their meeting planned at 5:30 on friday. Clearly that's not a healthy combination (which perhaps sparked this blog post). I'm also somewhat curious when they even eat, some of their schedules require them to lunch before noon (in some case even 11am) or after 4pm, and it doesn't look like they start their day early. Also what kind of cruel genius plans a daily meeting from 17:30 to 18:00? Of course with 6 meetings per day you're not going to get much work done no matter how you plan your day, but you can at least try to do it in a way that's vaguely sustainable.

cjf101 6y ago

I'm not saying the writer's workplace has a meeting problem, but there's a thing that happens at orgs that do have a meeting problem. It becomes normal to double book people, because you can never find a timeslot where someone doesn't have a meeting. It can also become known that you book focus time, and so people just ignore that you are busy, and book you in. It's also possible that once you are considered fairly respected that people trust you to decide what meetings you will attend. IMO, Anyone with a calendar like the one in the article should start with a conversation with leaders at the company. This is massively bad for productivity if you doing anything remotely knowledge work related. Booking focus blocks is a bit of a last resort. The problem isn't the calendar, it's the people and processes in the workplace.

contravariant 6y ago

Not only that I'm also somewhat shocked by the combination of their claim that they do work in 10pm to 1 am (which is bad enough on its own) and their meeting planned at 5:30 on friday. Clearly that's not a healthy combination (which perhaps sparked this blog post). I'm also somewhat curious when they even eat, some of their schedules require them to lunch before noon (in some case even 11am) or after 4pm, and it doesn't look like they start their day early. Also what kind of cruel genius plans a daily meeting from 17:30 to 18:00? Of course with 6 meetings per day you're not going to get much work done no matter how you plan your day, but you can at least try to do it in a way that's vaguely sustainable.