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I think another reason why meetings are an extra burden on Makers vs. for Managers is that for the Managers, the meeting is their work. Their job is to meet wi

I think another reason why meetings are an extra burden on Makers vs. for Managers is that for the Managers, the meeting is their work. Their job is to meet with people, get ideas exchanged, organise people and settle conflict, which you achieve by having meetings. In many cases, when the meeting is over, the Manager's work is done: 1 hour of meeting equals 1 hour of work. For makers though, the meeting can be additional to their main work, which is "making" something, and the meeting is really just a distraction, even if it is somehow related to what they are creating. When the meeting is over and the decision is made or the idea is communicated, the work still has to be done but the meeting time is now gone: 1 hour of meeting equals -1 hour of work, so 2 hours need to be done to catch up.

willchang 17y ago
That's a weird bit of reckoning at the end. If you're short an hour of work, an hour of work is all you need to catch up.
- fendale 17y ago
  I think he is trying to imply you cannot catch up. Doing that lost hours work consumes another hour and so on. The only way to catch up is to extend your working day by an hour.
- xiaoma 17y ago
  I don't think the reckoning is weird at all. Being interrupted for an hour in the middle of your work costs more than an hour in all but the most ideal cases. If you could somehow save your brain state in an instant, teleport directly to the meeting for an hour, teleport back, and then reload your previous brain state as you returned to your work, it would take exactly an hour to catch up. The fact is, it takes a bit of time to change gears for the meeting and then quite a bit more time to get back in the creative zone. Aside from just remembering all the details of what you were working on, it takes quite a bit of time for your body, including your brain, to get into a state of "flow".
  - abalashov 17y ago
    Tell it. In intensely focus-based knowledge work, the economics of human task switching - to borrow Joel Spolsky's term - is a formidable and intriguing science that managers who look at time as an interchangeable commodity or a cluster of cells on a spreadsheet simply don't grasp.
plinkplonk 17y ago
"I think another reason why meetings are an extra burden on Makers vs. for Managers is that for the Managers, the meeting is their work. " I am not very sure that's true. Most good managers I know kept meetings to a minimum and kept them short. Yes they did consider meetings to be "work", but they did try to minimize the duratin and frequency of their meetings. The best manager I know considers meetings a necessary evil (and so minimize them). He ran a whole division on a weekly 1 hour all hands meeting (plus lots of emails and so on but those are not as disruptive). Any smaller meetings had a twenty minute timer ticking down, with everyone standing up, and decisions were made fast. He once told me that every managers job was to make himself redundant as and that his (conception of his) job was to make sure he moved things to a state where the system would flow well in his absence, by setting up expectations of how conflicts would be resolved etc, and so he would have to interfere only in the very rare cases. He brought back the division from chaos and I would often see him sit (he sat "on the floor", not in his office) working on crosswords and so on, apparently doing nothing, but he had a finger on the pulse of what was going on and interfered minimally and effectively, obstacles being removed before they manifested. The organization ran like silk. He was the best boss I worked for and his subordinates loved him. He got promoted and was replaced by a less capable manager and soon enough we were drowning in meetings and no work got done
- ricaurte 17y ago
  Your last two paragraphs hit on a point that more managers need to implement but are afraid to, because most managers think that if they make themselves redundant, then they'll be laid-off, instead of promoted. I know of one manager in particular that is amazing at managing restaurants, but his problem is that he has to put in long hours to make sure the restaurant runs, and if he leaves on vacation, then the restaurant has often fallen apart (not to mention the years of increased stress levels it entailed worsened his cholesterol levels to the point he needed surgery). If instead he had trained everyone else to do his job, not only would he have had a ready supply of people to promote all these years, but he would also be a lot less stressed-out and maybe wouldn't have needed surgery.
  - access_denied 17y ago

willchang 17y ago

That's a weird bit of reckoning at the end. If you're short an hour of work, an hour of work is all you need to catch up.

fendale 17y ago
I think he is trying to imply you cannot catch up. Doing that lost hours work consumes another hour and so on. The only way to catch up is to extend your working day by an hour.
xiaoma 17y ago
I don't think the reckoning is weird at all. Being interrupted for an hour in the middle of your work costs more than an hour in all but the most ideal cases. If you could somehow save your brain state in an instant, teleport directly to the meeting for an hour, teleport back, and then reload your previous brain state as you returned to your work, it would take exactly an hour to catch up. The fact is, it takes a bit of time to change gears for the meeting and then quite a bit more time to get back in the creative zone. Aside from just remembering all the details of what you were working on, it takes quite a bit of time for your body, including your brain, to get into a state of "flow".
- abalashov 17y ago
  Tell it. In intensely focus-based knowledge work, the economics of human task switching - to borrow Joel Spolsky's term - is a formidable and intriguing science that managers who look at time as an interchangeable commodity or a cluster of cells on a spreadsheet simply don't grasp.

plinkplonk 17y ago

"I think another reason why meetings are an extra burden on Makers vs. for Managers is that for the Managers, the meeting is their work. " I am not very sure that's true. Most good managers I know kept meetings to a minimum and kept them short. Yes they did consider meetings to be "work", but they did try to minimize the duratin and frequency of their meetings. The best manager I know considers meetings a necessary evil (and so minimize them). He ran a whole division on a weekly 1 hour all hands meeting (plus lots of emails and so on but those are not as disruptive). Any smaller meetings had a twenty minute timer ticking down, with everyone standing up, and decisions were made fast. He once told me that every managers job was to make himself redundant as and that his (conception of his) job was to make sure he moved things to a state where the system would flow well in his absence, by setting up expectations of how conflicts would be resolved etc, and so he would have to interfere only in the very rare cases. He brought back the division from chaos and I would often see him sit (he sat "on the floor", not in his office) working on crosswords and so on, apparently doing nothing, but he had a finger on the pulse of what was going on and interfered minimally and effectively, obstacles being removed before they manifested. The organization ran like silk. He was the best boss I worked for and his subordinates loved him. He got promoted and was replaced by a less capable manager and soon enough we were drowning in meetings and no work got done

ricaurte 17y ago
Your last two paragraphs hit on a point that more managers need to implement but are afraid to, because most managers think that if they make themselves redundant, then they'll be laid-off, instead of promoted. I know of one manager in particular that is amazing at managing restaurants, but his problem is that he has to put in long hours to make sure the restaurant runs, and if he leaves on vacation, then the restaurant has often fallen apart (not to mention the years of increased stress levels it entailed worsened his cholesterol levels to the point he needed surgery). If instead he had trained everyone else to do his job, not only would he have had a ready supply of people to promote all these years, but he would also be a lot less stressed-out and maybe wouldn't have needed surgery.
- access_denied 17y ago