Always on the mark with these. I found working in a few places that burnout and stress for me was massively increased by constant "communication" which naturally took my focus away from the work.
Eventually I snapped, and said I wouldn't take any meeting unless I was given a brief and agenda to explain why I was needed and what contribution I was expected to make.
Going from 3 random meetings and phone calls a day to about 3 a week made such a massive difference to me.
Agreed. Even more infuriating when meetings are just pretenses for middle management to justify their positions. If an email could accomplish everything that the meeting did, you shouldn’t waste people’s time with a meeting.
So spot-on this is. I had a manager once that regularly bragged about how good he was at multi-tasking between projects and that I, a simple software engineer, should similarly be able to work simultaneously on several projects at once.
It's great to have some hard data on this phenomenon that was originally (semi-patiently) explained to me by the first team of engineers I worked with and then later personally experienced as I started coding on my own.
One of the reasons I've seen this happen is from managers who mean well, but simply can't help themselves. This is especially true if they find themselves bored for even a minute. They feel like they have to do SOMETHING and that usually involves interrupting others. I recently wrote about this: https://jonmrich.substack.com/p/its-okay-to-be-bored-as-a-leader
Always on the mark with these. I found working in a few places that burnout and stress for me was massively increased by constant "communication" which naturally took my focus away from the work.
Eventually I snapped, and said I wouldn't take any meeting unless I was given a brief and agenda to explain why I was needed and what contribution I was expected to make.
Going from 3 random meetings and phone calls a day to about 3 a week made such a massive difference to me.
Agreed. Even more infuriating when meetings are just pretenses for middle management to justify their positions. If an email could accomplish everything that the meeting did, you shouldn’t waste people’s time with a meeting.
So spot-on this is. I had a manager once that regularly bragged about how good he was at multi-tasking between projects and that I, a simple software engineer, should similarly be able to work simultaneously on several projects at once.
I will neither confirm nor deny that I have, on many occasions, put 4 hours meetings on my calendar to block out time to actually get stuff done.
It's great to have some hard data on this phenomenon that was originally (semi-patiently) explained to me by the first team of engineers I worked with and then later personally experienced as I started coding on my own.
One of the reasons I've seen this happen is from managers who mean well, but simply can't help themselves. This is especially true if they find themselves bored for even a minute. They feel like they have to do SOMETHING and that usually involves interrupting others. I recently wrote about this: https://jonmrich.substack.com/p/its-okay-to-be-bored-as-a-leader