Meetings feed on a diet of imbalance
Each Sunday as I look forward to starting my week inside a challenging job, solving complex issues with a great team, and doing several things that I love, I take a few moments and review my calendar for the week — only to find my reaction mixed.
I adore one-on-one calls and small recurring meetings with teams that are proactive, especially when they happen inside of my “productive manager” window of time (between 1PM and 5PM). These are meetings that get you excited — you know you will make discoveries, solve problems and that no one’s time or energy is wasted. I abhor those meandering meetings with large groups or unproductive teams that happen during peak creative and problem solving time (6 AM to Noon). You know the ones I mean — we could all just send the meeting owner our to-do list, thoughts, and goals for the week relative to their needs or projects in an email or add it to a Google Doc, a shared Slack tag or a shared Wunderlist and have that person follow up with questions for clarification if needed, but instead… we have a lengthy, unwieldy meeting.
Contemplating balance
In contemplating the challenges of needing to maintain balance (and thus, sanity), shifting fluidly between maker and manager roles, I recall this article on the subject by Paul Graham in 2009 that still rings true today: “Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule”.
“For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.” ~Paul Graham
This is even more problematic when taking into account that many jobs today require creative types to be more intrapreneurial (or entrepreneurial if you are in a start up and not a corporation), and that many creatives are also managers in some fashion. Add in the wrinkle of connectivity leading to a global economy and global business, and the need for time zone shifting stretches your day by necessity. It’s not uncommon in this environment for the average global worker to find their day lasting beyond 12 hours, yet their creative output diminishing or remaining flat, instead of growing.
What can you do?
The easiest way to handle the issue is to say “No” to meetings far more often than you may normally be inclined to. Declining meetings and blocking time for creative work is great in theory, but workers often find it difficult in practice, and — depending on the meeting’s “owner” — can have unintended consequences.
Another easy way to slide more meetings off your calendar is to ask “Does this need to be a meeting, or can we handle it via email or a quick one-on-one call?” I find that often, the answer to that is a relieved “Yes”. Everyone has a full stack of plates they are juggling.
Fostering a high level of cross communication is also excellent for reducing meetings. If there is a large campaign or project being designed, then the stakeholders from every team that project might touch at any point should be in the meeting. They should then follow up by relaying the information they learned to their team — and to any related teams that may have been left off the invite list — in a succinct wrap-up email. Much time is saved by constant cross-team communication (and the projects get better, since you then get input early on from those who may have a unique perspective, instead of having to be reactive once the campaign or project has begun).
My favorite way to reduce meetings is to schedule backwards during manager hours, leaving the morning largely free to produce actual work. This is tricky if you work across time zones, but if you can pull it off, it is a day-saver. In fact, if I find that my normal high rate of productivity has been slipping at all, a look at my calendar often reveals a glut of morning meetings, breaking up that time usually spent writing, designing, editing and analyzing creative output.
Changes in how we work
These issues are indicative of changes that have slowly been happening in how we work in all organizations, regardless of size. I see the struggles in maker vs manager schedules the most with peers and colleagues in America. Americans, especially, seem to have warring cultures: a culture of “busywork”, “hustle” and “presenteeism” that is loathe to give way to a culture of fluid work flows, time for thought, and an increased quality of productive work that comes from discarding the misguided need for a full calendar.
I’m certainly not the only one thinking about how we structure work and how that is changing. Stowe Boyd is planning a book on the topic in 2015, which he talks about in his “A manifesto for a new way of work”. Lighter minds, like that of Tim Ferriss, try to oversimplify the problem by tackling the concept of “efficient time” instead of tackling the underlying cultural problems behind time inefficiency and a general lack of respect for the time of others. Blog after blog talks about “reclaiming time”, but few tackle the reason time feels so inadequate to our needs: balancing two mindsets to achieve one goal.
I’m interested in hearing how you tackle this problem in your work. In a world where everyone needs to be a little creative and a little managerial at all times, what do you do for balance (within work — work/life balance is a pretty myth and the subject of another post altogether)?
