Here is a well-written piece by Paul Graham on why software developers (or generically, anyone who is a maker of something) hate meetings. As someone who lives between the worlds of those who make and those who manage, I deal with the struggle from both sides, but my mind is a maker’s mind. While this piece is written from the maker’s perspective, it gives other makers a fairly accurate view of how managers perceive time management and the scheduling of a day. Graham lays out the unique challenge of making things work despite the differences in time-management needs.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
(h/t Bart Lewis)
