Mastering time or being mastered

Paul Graham just 'stole' my story :-), presented in a much better way though.

I was thinking of the same topic while reading Paul's latest Maker's Schedule. It is interesting to see how people decide to go about their schedule and fill in their empty hollow calendar, esp. managers. For some, it is quite obvious that a belief they have been holding on for life time that meet'it'up and we all sorted. In scenarios we have multiple topics to talk about, easy enough, just make it multiple meetings! Truth of the matter is, not long after, you will find everyone is satisfied with the fact that they have done their jobs, now all is left is for time to do its bit. Whatever happens in the end, people are quite comfortable to shrug their shoulders, "hey, we have done our best - we had a meeting - it is just bad luck, that is all."

This is not exaggerating, not a tiny bit. I was lucky enough to work with one guy who really believed the fact driving the business via meetings is the ultimate solution. The fundamental problem here is quite obvious, only if you do not choose to ignore it though. Some smarter managers know when and how to take engineers' viewpoint and understand that it takes 'time', concentrated time to make things happen. So watch out, if you find yourself or people who work for you getting the habit of filling calendar with all sorts of meeting schedules, there could be something going very wrong here. Either people are just trying to disguise from the reality that they do not really know what is going on and what is to aim for, or you are on the edge of dragging the productivity down because you can not find a better way of communicating.

This guy I worked with was a pilgrim of working by timesheet. We soon found him buried in all sorts of meetings and he was never on time for anything. People start to find him take too much of his own and others time to satisfy his timesheet. In the end people unavoidably started to wonder the opposite. Does he know what he is supposed to be doing or he just have to replace the lack of confidence and plans by the stuffed calendar - poor meeting boy?

So, to be considerate is what I consider one of the most important criteria to be a good manager. (Being considerate does not mean being nice though :-).) Understand what it takes for engineers to produce something meaningful at certain quality standard is the base of management activity. It always works better for me to make sure I was not managing people's time FOR them. To know when to stand out of people's way is easy to slip from managers' mind, especially when fire starts to come out from everywhere and everyone on the food chain gets beaten up on daily basis. Hey, but what differentiate successful managers from the failed ones? So every time when I try to schedule a meeting I ask myself:

• Do I really need this meeting? How much it will cost me and the team to spend an hour in this meeting, would it be worthy consider how much we could probably get out of it?
• Is this meeting necessary or it is really just to make some people happy? If to make those people happy is critical, any other more productive ways I can make that happen? If it isn't critical, I am sorry, we are all grown ups...
• Am I driven by the calendar? Do I start to rely on calendar to think for me? When was the last time I take a deep breath and a realistic look at the cost and quality of the product, the returning rate of installed products?

Meeting means nothing really, if the purpose of a group of people to communicate important information in a much condensed manner is skewed. It replaces nothing, as far as I am concerned, certainly not the work itself.