Pages

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

Scattered meeting day syndrome

image I have observed that the most un-productive day would be to have scattered meetings all throughout the day.  

For example:

  • 9- 9.30 AM   First meeting
    10 – 12  Second meeting
    <Lunch break>
    2 – 2.30 another meeting
    3 – 4  last meeting of the day

After the first meeting, one would rush to get a cafe to prepare for the second one. By the time you grasp the second one, bell rings for lunch break. The day continues with meetings with a break of every half an hour, and end up with a pile of “real work” by 4 PM, causing too much stress. This leads to too many meeting syndrome

This is exactly what the Agilists dislike.In fact I have heard people calling Scrum has too many meetings !!   As per various researches, the task switching could cost nearly 40% productivity loss.

Solution

Personally I found that blocking a chunk of a day provides me the well deserved and dedicated focus.  Not sure if others have seen this happening ?   Have you experienced this ?  How do you deal with this scattered meeting syndrome  ?

Image courtesy : http://blog.officeformac.com/a-new-outlook-on-calendaring/

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have been through this quite a few times. Haven't yet figured out how to deal with this.
The only thing one can do is carry a laptop and try to do petty things done while attending the meetings..that too depends on your involvement required in the meetings.