Surprise, surprise…

I actually put together a blog post. Who’d have thunk it?

Sustainable Pace and Meetings

I’ll admit it: I’ve been triple-booked at work more than I can possibly imagine.

Part of that is a pure lack of institutional respect of people’s time, and the culture that dictates that everything is a priority, so obviously the other commitments you’ve made can’t possbily be as important as My Meeting.

But, part of that is an inherent lack of understanding of Sustainable Pace, especially when it comes to meetings.

Looking over my calendar for the past few months, I’m constantly amazed at the number of meetings that get scheduled in the miniscule crevices between other meetings. “Oh, you’ve got fifteen minutes between those two meetings. Let’s have a quick meeting to discuss this…”

Now, if I worked somewhere that employed a bunch of Marissa Mayers (see: BusinessWeek on “How to Run a Meeting Like Google”) then there’s a distinct possibility that this would be a very productive, if overwhelming possibility. But, I don’t, and it compounds the basic problem in my mind with this constant-stream-of-meetings mentality.

Today, I’ve had the opportunity to sit in a small conference room with one of my peers, and focus on one important deliverable. We called in a couple of experts when we needed them, and turned around our deliverable in a couple of hours. In short, a great use of our time.

After that, I felt myself mentally decompress. I took a few minutes to jot down some next-steps, and prepare myself for the next item on my big to-do list.

That took ten minutes.

Once I took that time, I was able to clearly and succinctly take care of the next items on my to-do list with a minimum of fuss, and with minimum interruptions on other people’s time. What could have (and possibly would have) resulted in two or three “quick little meetings” ended up being handled by a discussion or two, in under five minutes each.

I’ve read a lot over the past couple of years about two topics: multi-tasking at work in the name of productivity, and Adult ADD. Being ADD, I fully understand and live the juggling a thousand things lifestyle. It keeps my brain engaged, and paradoxically helps me focus.

But, I also realize that hand-in-hand with juggling a million different things is the ability to hyper-focus. When I need to, I can focus on a particular task and work on it to the exclusivity of anything else. In order to do that, I need to take the time to clear my plate, and catch the balls I have in the air, so to speak.

When my schedule is filled with back-to-back meetings, there’s no chance to clear my plate, no chance to take a minute to shift gears mentally. It’s a constant stream of new information and context switching, and much like when I’m juggling a million different things but none of them well, I’m in a meeting but not able to give it my full attention. Invariably, there are loose ends from the previous meeting that I need to capture, that will enter my head and distract me from the things I should be paying attention to now.

It’s an unsustainable pace, and it’s just as true with management and meetings as it is with Sprint tasks or a myriad of other things in life.

Without the time to absorb and acclimate new information and ideas, we’re just in an unsustainable flurry of things, and everything suffers.

How can we communicate this need to those making demands of our time? How can we - as developers, testers, or more generally as professionals - explain that we need moments of rest between bursts of activity? If that basic human need isn’t understood, what can we do to make it understandable?