Thoughts on Meetings

I like to work fully asynchronously! That doesn’t mean I can’t have calls with clients or attend a meeting at a specified time but it also doesn’t mean, I am available to clients during their office hours or willing to attend weekly meetings.

Here’s the problem I have with weekly fixed meetings. Let’s say a meeting is scheduled for 10 AM, that means I usually start working late that day because if I start at my normal time around 8 AM the meeting will only interrupt whatever I was working on.

Sometimes I’m smart enough to have some left-over work for that client which I can do before the meeting. If I submit simple bug fixes, however, we can’t address those in the meeting because the client didn’t have time to look at them and thus we have even less to talk about.

The other type of meeting is the emergency meeting where a PM (my client) just got off a call with their client and now has to talk to me, because of super-important, new developments.

My client then scheduling an emergency meeting for later that day is the worst of both worlds: I need to stop doing what I was doing, but not right now—which I already did in responding to that client—but again later in the day.

After reading this through again, I’m rambling. Right now I have too many scheduled weekly meetings and too many emergency meetings. Most of the time a well formulated ticket would have been so much more efficient for today-me and tomorrow-everybody-else.