by Serguey Shinder
It was half an hour, once a week, at two o'clock, and it was a good meeting. I want to be clear about that, because the obvious version of this story is about a pointless meeting and this is not that. The conversation mattered, the people in it were the right people, and decisions actually came out of it.
What I noticed, much later than I should have, was that the days with that meeting in them produced almost nothing else. Not less. Almost nothing. And the days either side were fine.
My first assumption was that the meeting ran long, which it did not. My second was that it was draining, which it slightly was, but not enough to explain a whole day. The real answer was duller and more structural, and I only saw it when I started paying attention to what I was doing at eleven in the morning.
At eleven I was thinking about the meeting. Not preparing for it in any useful sense, just rehearsing. Turning over the thing I wanted to raise, imagining the objection, composing a sentence I would not end up using. It cost nothing visible and it made real work impossible, because the part of my head that holds a problem was already holding something else.
And after eleven, there was no point starting anything. An hour and a half is not enough for the kind of work I was supposed to be doing, not when the end of it is a hard stop. So I did small things instead, and small things expand very politely to fill whatever you give them.
The meeting was thirty minutes. It was costing somewhere near three hours, and almost all of the cost was outside the meeting.
Moving it fixed it, which felt absurdly simple. We tried nine thirty and it was better. We settled on the last half hour of the day, and the difference in what I got done on those days was not subtle.
What I actually changed was not my calendar habits but the question I ask when someone proposes a time. I used to ask how long it would be. Now I ask what it sits in the middle of. A thirty minute call at eleven and a thirty minute call at five are not the same object. One of them removes half a day and the other removes half an hour.
The corollary is that the edges of the day are far more valuable than they look, and I give them away more readily now, on purpose. The middle is not really mine to give. It is already spoken for by the work, and by the forty minutes of anticipation that nobody puts on an invitation.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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