Remote Work: The Other Side of Online Meetings and How It Affects Us.

Illustration of an online meeting on a desktop computer

“One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.”
- Paul Graham , July 2009.

In remote work settings, regular meetings are as important as the product being built. However, developers and meetings don’t meet (pun intended). This article highlights why this problem exists and how it really affects us, especially the technical workers.
For example, A and B work in company XYZ.
A is the manager of B, a full-stack software developer. On a regular day, A’s job is to make sure B is working on the product: meeting deadlines and not building anything out of place.

This above looks okay, but a look into B’s day brings a lot to light: For over 2 hours, B is trying to fix a bug and suddenly there’s a pop-up reminder (the type you’d see on macs) for a meeting 30 minutes away. At this point, B loses concentration on the bug and subconsciously starts to countdown to the event knowing he can’t figure the code out just in time before the meeting, this is just the first among several other meetings that occur each day.

In the summer of 2009, Paul Graham (co-founder of YCombinator) wrote an article called Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule. In this writing, he came up with two different styles of working schedules outlined below:

Managers Schedule
A worker on a manager’s schedule is concerned with regularly coordinating people to produce an output. Simply put, a manager interrupts other workers just to make sure they are actually working on a designated task(s), ironic yet true.
In a similar discussion, Andy Grove his book High Output Management writes:

“A manager can do his ‘own’ job, his individual work, and do it well, but that does not constitute his output. If the manager has a group of people reporting to him or a circle of people influenced by him, the manager’s output must be measured by the output created by his subordinates and associates.

…..the key definition here is that the output of a manager is a result achieved by a group either under his supervision or under his influence. While the manager’s own work is clearly very important, that in itself does not create output. His organization does. By analogy, a coach or quarterback alone does not score touchdowns and win games.”

The Maker’s Schedule

The maker’s schedule is planned around large chunks of interrupted time that is spent working on difficult, cognitively demanding tasks. The focus of the maker is on making stuff. A worker on a maker’s schedule performs cognitive tasks that require focus and skill. People on the workers' schedule include engineers, designers, programmers, etc.

The Cascading Effect of Meetings

In Paul Graham’s words:

“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.”

For an employee on a manager’s schedule, creating a new meeting is simple and necessary. It’s just a matter of finding an available time in their schedule. But for an employee on a maker’s schedule, adding a meeting to the calendar means breaking up a big time block into smaller blocks. One meeting can ruin half a day for a maker.
Since no remote work organization can function without having regular meetings, here is a suggestion on how to plan an effective schedule.

How to hold an effective meeting schedule for managers and makers

1. Hold meetings on particular days
   If you’re a manager, it’s part of your job to protect and channel the energy of your team. You can’t expect meaningful output if you are constantly dragging them into meetings all the time.
2. Limit the pings
   Reducing meetings is helpful, but not if you spend your day chatting back and forth instead. So, also reduce the chatter on Slack or Email.
3. Respect employees’ work schedule
   If you’re a manager, respect the people who are in deep work. If someone doesn’t respond right away, it’s not the end of the world.
   It’s alluring, but by all means, don’t use WhatsApp as a workspace (that’s why slack exists).
4. Let them work (or cook)
   This may sound harsh, but if people aren’t able to produce the desired output, it doesn’t matter how organized you are as a manager or how you coordinate your downlines. Making is the ultimate goal.

Conclusion

Like many other software engineers, I believe regular meetings are a necessary evil and attending meetings is a necessity but to make the best out of this situation, it is very important that managers protect the time of their workers and in return, workers should plan a balanced schedule in order to solve complex problems and still keep in touch.✌🏽