Which Meetings Should You Kill?

Meetings, ugh. Even those of us who like a good meeting have plenty of experience sitting through painful, boring, poorly-run meetings that seem to exist only to waste our time. Engineers hate meetings: they take you out of flow and (in the pre-remote days) away from your monitors so that you can listen to some manager drone on and answer a couple of questions. Pointless. It’s not surprising that when a company takes a stand against meetings, they take a stand against big, boring meetings. Notoriously, Shopify has (more than once) cancelled all standing multi-person meetings in an effort to get rid of time wasters and give focus time back to their employees. I agree that it’s a great idea to revisit standing group meetings regularly, and get rid of the ones that are no longer serving a valuable purpose. But are the big boring standing meetings really the big problem, or are they the problem that senior managers face most often? I do think there is a meetings problem, but I don’t think the problem is big boring meetings, and I certainly doubt that is the problem at a company who regularly goes through a public exercise of cancelling all standing meetings! Instead, I fear that the culprit is a surprising new factor, one that started before the pandemic but has gotten even more out of hand in the world of remote work: 1:1s. <h2>One-on-one meetings are a quiet time waster</h2> I realized this when I asked friends why they didn’t think it was reasonable to expect line managers to write code* anymore because they were too busy. That surprised me, because how many meetings can a line manager be in? Their team, their boss’s staff meeting, some planning stuff, management 1:1s, ok. If the line manager is creating a bunch of group meetings, you should work with them to cancel the unnecessary ones before they drive their team to quit, and that would also give them time back to do some hands-on work. But the issue isn’t stand-ups, or group status meetings, or any of the other annoying project management ceremonies, as I expected. Instead, it is an overabundance of 1:1s. And this can apply not just to managers, but to Staff+ engineers as well! <a href="https://skamille.medium.com/which-meetings-should-you-kill-7430467c005b">Read More</a>