I know, I know. I’m supposed to be writing the second part to the series I started in June. I’ve once again become distracted by work, life, a few recruiters who didn’t bother to read my post about cold calls for dubious ventures, and a lovely bacerial/flu bug that’s been hounding me for the past ten days.
However, I just had to post a reference to this column by Stephen Dubner (he of Freakonomics fame) – it’s sums up a pet peeve of mine: Read This if you Hate Meetings. In it he references a rather remarkable essay by Paul Graham who divides the world into two kinds of people, Managers and Makers. Oh, Lord this is so true – emphasis is mine:
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
In other words, we’re a little like oil & water when it comes to how we manage time and scope projects. Which explains a lot about why managers want to scope things with milestones and action items and other things that manifest out of a meeting.
Seriously: When I look at all the projects I’ve worked on over my career that have been, oh let’s call them “completionally challenged”, they all have the hallmarks of being born from that bubbling cauldron of “productivity” that’s known as the “Business Requirements Meeting”. Alongside the damaging analogy of construction, I think the mentality of the modern business meeting with it’s bizzarro vernacular that treats verbs as nouns and vice-versa is doing equal damage to the success of projects.
In this regard, I think I would slightly modify Graham’s World View hypothesis from that of Managers and Makers to Talkers and Doers. I fall squarely in the latter camp. This is why I hate the archetypical business meeting so much: It lacks real purpose for the Doers becuase it is engineered for the Talkers – they live in the land of optics, PowerPoint presentations (ooh! another peeve) and banalities far removed from the world of the builder.