I've read this article about 4 times in the last few hours, and there's so much to say about it -- partly because it resonates pretty deeply with the product I'm currently building (reclaimai.com, apologies for the shameless plug) but also because I think it flies in the face of some logic that has emerged over the past several years. Namely, that meetings are anathema to productive organizations and that individualized "focus time" is the only way to achieve meaningful outcomes (see: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html).

The quote that sticks out to me the most:

> Some people will assert that meetings are creativity killers, and “a camel is a horse designed by committee”. But this is absurd. We’ve all been in conversations where one idea sparks another. And while an individual can write a novel or paint a portrait, solo creativity is no way to produce nuclear fusion or a new antibiotic. In a world full of specialists, complex projects require collaboration. Meetings can and do generate ideas that no individual could have conceived alone. They do not do so automatically, however. (emphasis mine)

Managers, in particular, need to internalize this ideology: if you're responsible for leading a broad group of highly-motivated-but-disparate individuals, your fundamental role is collaboration, analysis, collation, and decisionmaking. Not every instance of collaboration needs to take the form of a meeting, but as the author indicates, "there are many situations in which there’s simply no substitute for a meeting". In other words: managers actually need meetings to push the organization's agenda forward. It's not about more or fewer meetings, it's about more high-quality meetings that drive teams to figure hard stuff out and make informed, efficient, and effective decisions.

This isn't to say that focus time is meaningless or not useful to managers, but just that a manager's job is inherently less to individually make and more to synthesize ideas from smart people. That tends to happen in interactive, real-time forums.

One thing Tim doesn't touch on here is how meetings align to priorities, both for the manager and for the company at large. Or: how does your calendar, the declarative record of where you'll likely spend your time, the oft-hedonic treadmill of your week, actually reflect what's important to you at a strategic level? There's a super interesting article that Mike Monteiro wrote in 2013 (https://medium.com/@monteiro/the-chokehold-of-calendars-f70b...) that touches on this exact topic.

His basic thesis is that if all you do is block out time for "working" or "focus time" on your calendar, that time is inherently more interruptible than the meetings. This is anecdotally pretty spot-on for most people: how many times have you been sent an invite for a meeting that overlaps with your precious working time, with the inviter stating "Well, I saw that you just had 'Working' there, so I figured you were free"? That's the interruptibility of focus time in action.

A better way, IMO, is to actually map all the time on your calendar to real priorities. Don't just put "working" time down. State what you're planning to do with that time as part of the actual calendar event, and make it known to those who would interrupt it. This does two important things for your schedule:

1) It makes you think about your time in a much more fundamentally useful and meaningful way. You'll also probably find that a ton of events just don't map to anything strategic for you or the organization.

2) It signals that that time serves a purpose, not just a catchall for reading email or Slack.

If you're interested in this methodology, I wrote a post about it a few weeks ago: https://blog.reclaimai.com/posts/2019-07-11-how-to-fix-your-...

user:	henryshapiro
created:	August 23, 2019
karma:	4
about:	co-founder @ reclaimai.com

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