Sourcegraph CEO here. I came across a product here on HN that is helping with the problem of being a maker at a company with meetings. It’s called Meetter (https://www.meetter.app/) and it lets you block off a specific hour each day/week for meetings instead of making your entire day open to scattered meetings. I am just speaking as a happy user and customer, I am not affiliated with them in any way.
Thanks for sharing this. As the CEO of a company, did you introduce this to the rest of your company? How long have you been you using it? Also, previously, did you try the strategy of blocking time for yourself that prevents people from scheduling meetings with you during this "solo" time?
I am on-and-off conversing with the team at meetter ever since we started using it for some of our meetings. They are very responsive and helpful.
The concept is solid but it takes a cultural shift which can be hard. I am all for less but better meetings and condensing the schedules.
If someone would ask me to describe what meetter is I would say "An automated team assistant that tries to make sure that all topics of your org can get focused meeting time in one or multiple big blocks"
"Good" orgs will push for a commitment that everyone is available at the _same_ time slots, say 2 hours every Mon, Wed, Fri. Meetter (and well created topics) will do the rest and nobody needs to juggle.
Prerequisite is having enough meeting spaces or being more remote as the number of _parallel_ sessions (formerly called breakouts) is dynamic.
Edit: also the slack integration is great, makes creating topics a breeze and helps transparency.
Just FYI: 'dang is one of the HN moderators, so I'm sure he's well aware. He (and others) often add links to old discussions not to say "this is a dupe, shouldn't be here", but as a way for people to easily find the old discussions if they care to read them.
Oh yes. As the other repliers explained, the intent behind linking to past discussions is just to satisfy curiosity. Otherwise we'd mark the post [dupe] and bury it.
I wish I could find a brief way to signify this when making such a post. It would be tedious to spell the intention out every time, and yet without it, a lot of readers mistakenly think that it's about shaming the submitter for reposting; exactly the opposite of what we mean!
We built a tool around this essay to help better coordinate across maker and manager time: https://www.getclockwise.com/
At the core, it defragments your calendar, but it also provides a suite of utilities to help you better organize your time (color coding, Slack status, personal calendar sync, auto travel time, etc.). PG's essay has been a consistent point of inspiration for us.
Engineering teams at teams from 5 – 1000 use us. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Thanks for building Clockwise. Our entire team uses it, and it's quite useful for blocking off chunks of time.
The one part where we run into trouble is: we give our Calendly links a ton to external folks to schedule meetings.
Now either we mark our Clockwise blocks as "busy" in which case it's very difficult to schedule a meeting with us via Calendly, or "free" in which case people can schedule meetings with us at any point during the block in which case the block usually gets broken up.
Something that would be great is the ability to allow meetings in eg the first 45m or last 45m of a Clockwise block >2hrs long.
Whether you accomplish this by fragmenting blocks (45m free / 1 hr busy / 45m free), or some deeper integration w/ Calendly is immaterial, but this sort of thing would be immensely helpful!
If you haven't read the book Peopleware, I recommend it. It clearly defined to me, as a maker in Paul grahams terminology, what was and wasn't working on my team and why.
I have a similar "partition" but it's forced on me by laws of physics: I live on a tropical island a bit less than half-way around the world. By force of everyone else's schedule in the US, my "business time" goes from about 5 am (about as early as I can bear to take a meeting) to about 9 am when everyone on the west coast is wrapping up their day. Then I attend to my work in the lab where I can sit down to the first "maker" part of my day, diagnosing cancer under the microscope. After dinner I usually have a second "maker period", reading papers, working through a computer science text (I never got a formal computing education but was lucky that physics proved to be "close enough"), planning experiments, and writing long-form business documents.
This also called process orientation vs goal orientation. Goal orientation looks good on paper but its largely a disaster. It's good to be both but err on the side of the process. There's a reason why great mangers are programmers. Shit managers are in it for the money or status and are likely the types to yell out - why isn't it done yet.
It doesn't take a whole lotta imagination to come up with world-changing and ambitious goals.
You should really check out woven.com (calendly meets google calendar meets doodle). One of the most under-hyped startups in the productivity space this year.
It's been a gamechanger for blocking off parts of my calendar while creating "templates" for different styles of meetings that are only available at certain days/times (for example: client calls, board meetings, or coffee meetings).
It's completely changed how I organize my time and one of the main levers for me doubling my productivity this year.
22 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] threadif you only want to meet 2 hr per day, you’re gonna have a very very hard time coordinating with others that have a different hour set aside.
and you could just block off all me time in your existing calendar anyway.
The concept is solid but it takes a cultural shift which can be hard. I am all for less but better meetings and condensing the schedules.
If someone would ask me to describe what meetter is I would say "An automated team assistant that tries to make sure that all topics of your org can get focused meeting time in one or multiple big blocks"
"Good" orgs will push for a commitment that everyone is available at the _same_ time slots, say 2 hours every Mon, Wed, Fri. Meetter (and well created topics) will do the rest and nobody needs to juggle.
Prerequisite is having enough meeting spaces or being more remote as the number of _parallel_ sessions (formerly called breakouts) is dynamic.
Edit: also the slack integration is great, makes creating topics a breeze and helps transparency.
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10658187
2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4512023
2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=718279
I wish I could find a brief way to signify this when making such a post. It would be tedious to spell the intention out every time, and yet without it, a lot of readers mistakenly think that it's about shaming the submitter for reposting; exactly the opposite of what we mean!
Finishing with a (somewhat forced perhaps) positive note may encourage this one eg "I'm looking forwards to today's insights".
Then again, this could just be fixating on the little problems!
At the core, it defragments your calendar, but it also provides a suite of utilities to help you better organize your time (color coding, Slack status, personal calendar sync, auto travel time, etc.). PG's essay has been a consistent point of inspiration for us.
Engineering teams at teams from 5 – 1000 use us. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
The one part where we run into trouble is: we give our Calendly links a ton to external folks to schedule meetings.
Now either we mark our Clockwise blocks as "busy" in which case it's very difficult to schedule a meeting with us via Calendly, or "free" in which case people can schedule meetings with us at any point during the block in which case the block usually gets broken up.
Something that would be great is the ability to allow meetings in eg the first 45m or last 45m of a Clockwise block >2hrs long.
Whether you accomplish this by fragmenting blocks (45m free / 1 hr busy / 45m free), or some deeper integration w/ Calendly is immaterial, but this sort of thing would be immensely helpful!
It doesn't take a whole lotta imagination to come up with world-changing and ambitious goals.
A.k.a. “Goals vs. Systems”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw
It's been a gamechanger for blocking off parts of my calendar while creating "templates" for different styles of meetings that are only available at certain days/times (for example: client calls, board meetings, or coffee meetings).
It's completely changed how I organize my time and one of the main levers for me doubling my productivity this year.