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A colleague of mine shared an excellent article from Paul Graham on meetings. I highly recommend reading it if you find yourself in a lot of meetings throughout the day.

Reading the article could not have come at a better time for me – as I’ve found myself taking on more meetings, I’ve found almost 50% of my time is spent running from meeting to meeting, assigning action items, putting together meeting agendas, and scheduling people. Yet, I always knew it was important to be cautious when scheduling engineers, as meetings would mean 30 minutes or 1 hour less of development time. Scheduling time with someone several pay grades above me often made me pause and think about the cost of a meeting – both in terms of the time two or more people need to be in a room and how much this costs the company if the meeting is ineffective. Putting these concerns in the perspective of a maker/manager schedule helped make this distinction that much clearer.

I’m not sure what is the specific point of this blog post – maybe it’s ultimately that I found this article interesting and you should read it too. But, I think as I continue to have more and more meetings, I need to be cautious of not only having a meeting when necessary, but finding the right time and context to schedule it. The essay made me think about how I can use the advice to make my role a bit more effective, although these changes can’t be explicitly linked to results. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Decide if you should have meetings early in the week or later in the week, depending on actionables you expect to see come out of it.
• If you want to have a meeting, think about scheduling right after lunch or before. This means one longer, extended break, and less chances meetings sprinkled throughout the day don’t break up the day.
• Be congizant of emails – even if the person you email is working hard on something, you would expect that persons’ email to be closed, but this is hardly ever the case. This can be a distraction.
• Take advantage of lunch – this is a natural and often expected break. Use it to have an informal but productive chat with someone.

Do you have any tips to share on schedules?