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Keeping meetings from taking over your day

I'm not a big fan of meetings, but they seem to be an inevitable part of business life. Even in the unconventional life of a startup, meetings are hard to avoid. There's no beating the quality of communication from a face-to-face meeting, or a phone call, versus email or chat.

If you've read Paul Graham's essay "Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule", you'll know what I mean when I say meetings are costly for me. As a writer, I run on a maker's schedule, just as Josh does, being a programmer. For us, one coffee meeting cuts out half our day (at least—often the disruption throws us off so much we don't get anything important done for the whole day, just like PG talks about in his essay).

But never having meetings at all doesn't really work. We miss out on meeting interesting people, making new connections that could be useful to us later on, and helping other startup founders in Melbourne who could benefit from what we've learned so far.

Since I've come to terms with the inevitability of meetings, I've been trying to find better ways to fit them into my schedule without negatively impacting my work. Here are a few ideas I've picked up.

Set aside a day for meetings

In Kevin Hale's Stanford lecture on building a product users love, he explained during the Q&A about how his team at Wufoo managed to make remote working work. One rule they had was to set aside half a day every Friday for meetings:

We said, no biz dev meetings, no talking with other outside parties. They'd have to be done on Friday, on that half-day; they couldn't be done in the middle of the week.

During the week whenever an employee needed to interrupt someone else to discuss something with them or ask for help, there was a limit of 15 minutes per item for discussion. After 15 minutes they had to table the topic until Friday when they could bring it up with the whole team. Apart from avoiding major disruptions and discussions during the week when the team was getting their best work done, Kevin said this also led to many of the problems being solved by themselves, as employees had to sleep on them and would find an answer before Friday's meeting rolled around anyway.

Multi-task meetings and exercise

While it's a myth that we can simultaneously do several things that require our attention, we can do something automatic, like walking, while we pay attention to something else. Walking meetings aren't the easiest to organise, since they're less common, and they definitely don't change the fact that a meeting disrupts your workday. The reason I included this is because as someone who works at a desk all day, I've been struggling to find time to fit in more exercise—since exercise is essentially time I can't work, it's very hard to justify more of it.

If I have to have meetings anyway, it makes sense to try to get some exercise out of the disruption as well.

Have two workdays

In PG's essay on the maker's schedule, he talks about his own schedule when he was working on his company, Viaweb. He would work from lunchtime until dinner on business stuff, and do his programming work from dinner until 3am. Without realising it, he'd split his workday into two parts: a manager's schedule and a maker's schedule. Cleverly, he stuck to the manager's schedule during business hours and the maker's schedule at night, when he would be free from interruptions.

I'm an early bird, so staying up until 3am and then sleeping until 11 is probably not going to work well for me. But the early hours of the morning have the benefit of being quiet and uninterrupted regardless of which side you come at them from. In my case, I'd probably try starting my day at 4am on a maker's schedule, working until lunchtime, then switching to a manager's schedule until dinner. And probably going to bed quite soon after dinner if I was getting up at 4am every day.

I've tried splitting a normal workday in half, and it generally doesn't work for me. Like most people on a maker's schedule (according to PG), I like to have a full day ahead of me to create if I'm going to attack something ambitious.

Bonus: Employ a rubber duck

If you haven't read it, here's a cool story about a way to find answers on your own. Even if you had, the story of the duck is worth reading many times. This is more related to solving problems than meetings, but when people are coming to you with questions or problems to solve throughout the day, it can be just as disruptive as a meeting.

The duck theory is this: if you explain your question to an imaginary person, or an inanimate object (in the story it's a stuffed duck), quite often you'll discover the answer on your own, simply through the process of talking through the question. Jeff Atwood advocates this process for programmers who ask questions on Stack Overflow. Often, he says, you'll find the solution by yourself just through the process of writing out your question carefully—and then you won't even need to publish it.

In the story about the duck, the question-asker later becomes the mentor, and employs their own "duck" device: a picture of a politician. Mentees find their own answers in many cases by asking the politician in the picture first, cutting down the amount of times they need to actually ask another person for help.

If you're running a team or working in an office with colleagues who often need help, you might want to try employing a duck to handle some of their queries for you. I imagine whatever you choose will become a talking point in the office for new visitors, as well as cutting down on your workday disruptions.

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Image credit: Markus Spiske