If you’re still developing your approach to that ubiquitous office reality the Meeting, programmer Paul Graham may be able to help you sort out your thinking on the issue. Meetings are loved by some and loathed by others. Graham says that’s because your attitude towards meetings reveals whether your office role is primarily that of a manager or a maker. Clarifying your role and the part meetings play in your work can help you better plan and utilize your time to achieve results. Graham explains:
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour….
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least.
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 someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting … doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
Of course every business needs both managers and makers, and one mode of working isn’t more valuable than the other — they’re just different. But everyone still needs to work together, and that’s the difficulty. Graham doesn’t have all the answers, but he does hope that his article voicing the need for meetings to be maker-friendly while still working for managers will help. He suggests that instead of endless meetings, bosses should hold office hours at the end of the day. If you’ve got a good relationship with your boss, or a senior maker who has some pull, you might forward his article to them as “interesting reading.”
BNET also offers a host of resources on improving meetings, which may be of use to those figuring out how best to schedule their work lives, including:
- A feature package on making meetings matter
- A handy widget to calculate the true cost of a meeting (could make your boss reconsider)
- Hints from Seth Godin on how to get in and out of the conference room quickly
(Image of meeting by Simon Blackley, CC 2.0)
