Meetings

I don’t have some revolutionary new take on daily standups or anything like that. This isn’t some grand reworking of any part of the agile manifesto. It’s another rant. Eventually, if you’re a developer, you will have to take part of a daily standup call, where everyone has to give an update on the previous day and state what they plan to do during the day. I understand why this is a valuable meeting in the ideal case: everyone on the team gets updated on what everyone else did and is doing without having to repeat themselves. However, very rarely is the ideal case what actually happens. Usually, way too many people end up on the standup call, and then you end up tuning out people you don’t want to listen to, and then you end up tuning out everyone. Which defeats the purpose of the standup. Also, maybe I am not working on a small enough team, or maybe my work is spread out or siloed enough, but very rarely do people give updates on the level that I need. For instance, if I am working on something with one other person, we probably have a pretty similar understanding of approximately what the state of the project is, but I would want to know more details about the last issue that he ran into and how he overcame it. However, since we both feel like we have to give an update that is distilled down for the other 18 people on the call, neither of our updates really end up being that useful to each other, and they are probably being tuned out by the people we are distilling it down for. As soon as the standup is done, I am sending him a message or getting on another call with him anyways, so there was not really a point to the standup. ...

This is not going to be anything revolutionary, but I have observed this about myself and what works for me. If I have 30 minutes or so between meetings, very little programming work is going to get done in that amount of time. By programming work, I mean the kind of deep work that you get done when you’re in flow state and you aren’t staring at the blank cursor. It ususally seems like it takes 10-15 minutes to get into that state. But I am definitely not going to get into that state if I know that I will only have 15 minutes in that state before my next meeting. So obviously, the best thing to do is to bunch all your meetings together. That’s ideal, but not always possible. Most of my meetings are with people who are in way more meetings than me, and they are always changing the schedule, or running late, or double booked. So what to do when you are essentially subject to someone else’s meeting schedule? ...