Management Meetings via "Office Hours"?
Interesting article on the Freakonomics blog today about the difference between "Manager's Schedule" and "Maker's Schedule."
see here: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/read-this-if-you-hate-m...
original content: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
This Paul Graham has some interesting points, namely that by scheduling meetings without regard to what your directs are doing, you may be chopping up their time so much that they can't get "hard" things done (like a programming project that takes a full afternoon of thinking and working without interruption).
I'd be interested to hear about what folks on here are doing, in terms of scheduling, so that they aren't the "evil" manager that schedules a meeting right when work is getting done!
Paul Graham suggests his solution to meeting with different innovative companies that he has funded as an investor: have "office hours" available at the end of certain workdays and let people sign up for meetings. Not sure that would work will all types of directs...
accidentally not evil
I agree with Graham that software people in particular, and really any kind of maker, need long blocks of uninterrupted time. I've seen this with editors and researchers, with craftspeople and artists, and a little with light manufacturing. If you're engaged in a design activity (and software is a design activity) then you need "conceptual time" to figure out what you're building.
When I think about one-on-ones, the people least likely to be late, or to ask to reschedule, are those who have their one-on-ones first thing in the day or last thing in the afternoon. There's enough variation in work schedules that two-hour blocks in the morning get 60% of my people first thing, and another 20% see me just before they leave for the day. The three guys in the middle of the day are most likely to come late and be distracted, or in one case simply forget to show up a third of the time. There is a strong preference, for working meetings, one-off meetings, for 11:00 and 13:00. I have a few standing meetings with developers at other companies, and now that I look at time zones, they're picking 9:00 or 11:00 in their timezone, so they have the rest of the morning to do "real work." The one meeting we got to schedule is at 13:00, so we have the rest of the afternoon.
I'm on the manager schedule, so people come interrupt me when it's convenient for them. That may help explain why I get so little software work done myself, except on the days when I'm not in the office.
I've always resisted Mark's suggestion to put certain kinds of activities on my schedule at the end of the day. For example, I don't do my quarterly accomplishment review at the end of the day, because it never takes the 30 minutes he suggests: It takes more like 90, as I try to pull something concrete and measurable out of my accomplishments, which don't have bottom-line-dollar impacts. I do it earlier in the day, and protect when I go home to my daughter.
I think my main critique of Graham's analysis is that managers (good ones, anyway) need "think time" too. Perhaps too many managers aren't scheduling time to think, but are letting themselves be captives of other people's schedules.
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