Meet or Make

It’s pretty basic. You can’t make and meet at the same time.

Some people just love to meet. They derive a bizarre sense of satisfaction and self-worth based on how full their calendar appears. These are the people that enjoy creating meetings, that like to “offline” or “table” parts of a discussion as it creates the opportunity to have yet another meeting.

These are the people that makers want to repeatedly punch in the throat if shadow boxing an imaginary adams apple was a billable task.

For a maker, having meetings takes significant time away from their main function, which is to make. Meet-ers often forget that time spent in meetings is not made up elsewhere - for a maker, its simply time lost and not spent towards making. Taking a few hours a day to have meetings for a maker can kill productivity , particularly if those meetings are scheduled at times that don’t allow for blocks of focused ‘making’ to occur.

To those that love to meet - be kind to the makers. Run meetings efficiently, provide agendas, provide goals for resolution. Try to block meetings together at the one end of the day to allow a maker to have a significant block of time to focus on making. You can’t recover those hours spent meeting for a maker, unless you account for them in the schedule and ahead of time, which is rarely ever the case.

Mostly, remember - meet or make. If you choose to meet , revisit your expectations for the making process.

Please read Paul Graham’s 2009 post on the makers schedule, its perfectly articulated. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html