Photo by Mariano Colombotto

Why Programmers Don’t Like Meetings (share this with your manager)

Imagine you are driving at full speed on an empty highway, and then suddenly, you hit an hour-long traffic jam. Your 8-hour trip becomes 9 hours. Frustrating, isn’t it?

Now imagine that getting back to full speed is a slow business. It takes at least 30 minutes, not the 10 seconds you were hoping for. Now your trip is 9 hours and 30 minutes — 90 minutes longer than expected.

The reason for this extra 30 minutes is that any intellectually intense work requires flow. Flow is a mental state when the brain is most productive. After a hitch, getting back into the flow state takes time.

Being in the flow is like driving at full speed on an empty highway. Being interrupted is like hitting a traffic jam.

You are finally driving forward at full speed again, but then you hit two more 15-minute traffic jams, hours apart.

Think you lost another 90 (15+30+15+30) minutes? Unfortunately, it is a lot worse. You’ve just lost the whole day.

Getting into the flow requires a lot of energy. With every distraction, it becomes a lot harder.

Photo by Jens Herrndorff

That is why programmers, and everyone else who makes great stuff, don’t like meetings.

I’m not suggesting that you should eliminate meetings. They are absolutely essential to the productivity of the team.

Verbal communication is by far the most efficient way to collaborate, but only if the meeting is short, small, and held at the right time.

The definition of short is 5–15 minutes. The definition of small is 2–4 people.

Help programmers to do their best jobs

There are two simple rules:

1. Hold all meetings either at the beginning, or better, at the end of the work day. Agree on a daily hour that works best and use it on-demand for your short and small talks. For teams with members in different timezones, you will have to select something on the intersection.
2. Stop scheduling any recurring group meetings. Like daily, weekly and monthly. Recurring meetings include more people than needed for longer than necessary. They also make it hard to find time to discuss things that matter the most at the moment.

This is how a programmer’s ideal calendar looks:

Week schedule to maximize the flow state

Put this schedule in place for all programmers in your team. And you can ignore all the outdated advice out there on how to run “great meetings.”.

Gene Podolyak is a Co-Founder of Meetter, a meetings app that keeps your team in the flow.

Best content on this topic

[1] Paul Graham: Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

[2] Al Pittampali: “Read This Before Our Next Meeting” | Talks At Google