sawyl | The horror of meetings

Good piece in today's Guardian on the horror of meetings and why they're particularly bad for creative types:

The writer and programmer Paul Graham points out a key difference between managers and what he calls "makers". By this he means creative types such as writers or programmers, though it's tempting to extend it to everyone whose job involves doing something rather than talking about it. "There are two types of schedule," he writes at paulgraham.com, "which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

"When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done . . . But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started. 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."

And how much worse if you're not just forced to sit through tedious and irrelevant meetings, but also required to write up the minutes afterwards...