Discussion on question by Gray Sheep: A way to fight back the meeting-bongo, how dangerous is this idea?

Feeds

03:17

Q: A way to fight back the meeting-bongo, how dangerous is this idea?

Last week I had 40 work hours and about 25 of it were spent in various meetings, talks, and so on. This has become commonplace and I think it is time to fight back. I think the company needs think a little bit about whether they hired programmers or meeting-listeners. Note, these meetings are abo...

Gray Sheep

@JoeStrazzere Probably not. This is roughly a matrix-like organization and meetings are coming from various sources recognizing only partially the authority of other bosses to waste our time. There is no tracking about the reality of the time what we spent on meetings. Only the planned length of the planned meetings is tracked. This is what I want to fix.

@JoeStrazzere If a software developer sits on meetings in 25 hours of a week, then it gravely affects the work quantity (and also the quality because the continuous breaks of the focus). I simply can not work because I must sit listening s..t talks.

@JoeStrazzere I can not ignore a meeting, it is my workplace obligatory to take part on them. Once I did, in a previous job. The result: I was not fired, but I went out of the processes. And much later, it was a part of the reasons why that job ended.

Mr. Engineer

You should discuss it with your boss, tell him that these meetings are taking too much of your actual worktime and ask if you could leave some of them unattended. Meetings do not make money for company, building product does, so I think he will allow you to concentrate on your work. Today's problem really are people who like to talk about technology but don't know how to build it.

Gray Sheep

@JoeStrazzere I can not. 1) He backs my job, while he is one of the meeting-generators. 2) He is only one of the meeting-generators.

@Mr.Engineer You say, that I, on the lowest level of the command chain, should suggest to the whole pyramide to change their workings? No, it won't work.

@JoeStrazzere There are multiple bosses. Project leaders, various dev leads and so on. We are simultanously part of multiple, overlapping groups. Reference. Stat of the last week: 40 working hours, 25 of them were spent on listening bulls..t instead work, and it has no easily available trace. | The boss also helps me to integrate into the company, and he is also one of the meeting-organizers (not the worst one, but one of them).

Mr. Engineer

@GraySheep I, too, hate unneeded meetings, but your boss won't know about that unless you tell him the same thing you told us in OP: too many meeting hours are significantly damaging the quality and quantity of your work, so you need to politely ask your boss which one is more important: meetings or product?

Gray Sheep

@JoeStrazzere In theory I can (yes to my direct & real boss), in practice it does not look to be a nice idea. I need his simpathy and trust.

Joe Strazzere

03:17

@GraySheep - if I had a job where I couldn't discuss things with my boss, I'd be looking for my next job. Either way, this calendar idea won't solve the actual problem. Good luck.

Mr. Engineer

@GraySheep How would you lose his trust by telling him that meetings take too much of your actual worktime? You need to understand that in the end, company revenue is a priority number one for any company that wishes to stay in business, so managers will prioritize your actual work over everything else but they cannot read your thoughts, so you need to carefully, politely discuss it with your boss/manager. And by boss I mean one whose name is in your employment contract.

Abigail

It's not the hours which matter. Ask yourself two things. "Does the meeting add value to my work?". "Does my presence add value to work of the other participants in the meeting?". If the answer to both questions is no, you shouldn't be in the meeting. If either answer is "I don't know" -- find out.

TooTea

@Abigail And then there are the meetings where you're there just on standby in case you happen to be needed all of a sudden (your boss needs you to comment on something, …). 99% of the time you can sleep through the whole thing, but not having you there in the 1% of cases might end up being very expensive.

Andy Lester

I think the dangerous part of what I have read is your attitude, which is very hostile. You should approach this with the attitude that you are looking to help the company, not show your anger at the situation.

Issel

You need to ask people to create an agenda and attach it in the meeting invite, and then you can hold people to the agenda. Then when the 30 mins are up, you can say "Hey guys, I have another meeting, if we didn't get to everything on the agenda then lets setup another meeting." Hopefully this sets the tone to tackle the items on the agenda and to keep to the time on the meeting invite.

Cristobol Polychronopolis

03:17

I did pretty much that, but with a Casio pocket organizer. At the end of the week, I was able to show not only that I had no time to work, but had conflicting meetings about 15 hours a week. It worked for me, but I'm in the US and had a decent rapport with my manager.

DaveG

Your boss needs to know what you are doing. Seems like it's actually your duty to record this time and show him. Putting it into your calendar is a good approach, visual information is more compelling than just "spent X hour Monday in Y meeting".

Bernhard Barker

Asking how to reduce overrunning or unnecessary meetings is probably a better fit for this site than asking us to evaluate a particular solution you have in mind to achieve the same. The former should give a fair comparison of the best possible solutions to the problem (and you can even mention your proposed solution there if you want to make sure it's included in the comparison), while with the latter the answers may focus more on why your solution is or isn't reasonable instead of motivating or explaining better solutions. Related: the XY problem.

Paŭlo Ebermann

For me meetings usually can't take much overtime, because the next meeting is coming soon.

15 hours later…

jmathew

18:14

Could you and one (or many) similarly annoyed coworker schedule a long meeting (say 4 hours) for "peer coding" ahead of time and then just use the time to code in silence?

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