In my view meetings are the most powerful channel for social signaling which unfortunately is at least half the revealed job in white collar jobs. That was (and still is) the hardest thing for me to accept as the child of blue collar parents.
This. Seems like the more you sync with your manager, the more he/she likes you and your career seems to flourish. Nothing much to do with the quality of your thinking or work it seems. If I do my job but don't have a great relationship with my manager, to hell with my career. But if I sync with my manager everyday for even the smallest minutiae, I am seen as team player. Go figure.
One reason is that there are a lot of people that refuse to do anything unless there is a meeting.
I work with people that...
* When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
* Will ignore requests to review PRs, or look into problems, for weeks on end. When I ask "what would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?", they'll suddenly spring into action, or say that a meeting is not necessary, but prove that in fact it is by refusing to do anything before the prospect of a meeting is raised.
I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.
I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.
The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.
Yeah that's true to an extent. I've also had many occasions where someone asks for an update on x and I respond with a two line email asking a yes/no question and the person just says "let's hop on a quick call" etc. That's so frustrating because they're turning 30 seconds into 30 minutes.
Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world
ornthey think they have a lot of questions and think they will be less disruptive by having a call. You also didnt give them the response they wanted to hear, which is that you own the problem and they can tell somebody else that its being handled
Some people only really think things through by talking. Reading doesn’t do it for them. Even if they’re just talking to themselves, they don’t really process the information until it actually comes out of their own mouths.
You need to figure out which people are which type. You seem to be a “this could have been an e-mail” type of person. So am I. But my wife is a talker.
For some of those talkers, they actually need to see your face and not just hear your voice. Otherwise, they feel like they’re not getting any information from you.
And for some of those people, it has to be in-person, a video call won’t do — they can’t see your entire environment around you and all the things you can see which they cannot.
To be fair, over 90% of all human communication is not verbalized — it’s in the expression on their face, the way they look around the room, what they’re looking at while they’re talking to you, your body language, the faces you’re making when they are the one talking, etc….
Of the remainder, over 90% is not the actual text of the words being spoken, it’s in the delivery of the words, your tone of voice, are you speaking quickly or slowly, etc….
So, those of us who are on the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum, we are depending solely on the text in front of us, which is about 1% of the total information that could have been conveyed through non-textual and non-audio parts of the process.
If you’re okay with that, then that’s great! But that only works with other people who are on that end of the spectrum.
So, to get back to my earlier point — you need to know what type of person you are, and you need to know what type of person the other person/people is/are. And you need to adapt your communication style to suit them. Or, make sure that they understand where your limits are and how far you can adapt, and then it’s up to them to try to adapt the rest of that distance.
My wife and I are about to celebrate our 27th anniversary. We are still very much a “work in process” on this topic. I am no expert, but I do have decades of experience with hard lessons that I’ve learned over the years.
100% agree. Most of the time, when I hear "this could have been an email," it's from someone with a track record of not reading (or writing and responding to) emails meaningfully.
Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:
"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"
"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"
"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".
I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.
The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.
Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.
It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.
My solutions to these problems are thus:
1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.
2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.
3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.
4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.
Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".
Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.
Well, most of the time "this could have been an email" means "if it were an e-mail, I could just ignore it instead of having an hour of my life wasted".
> * When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
You hit the nail on this, a lot coming from middle managers too who still think that a busy calendar of these meetings it means they are very productive. I remember a manager I worked with, he was so keen on having meetings, a discussion between me and a colleague and he overheard it? Meeting to discuss “the conflict”!! It was soul crushing experience thankfully i left quickly, only to know later he started having meetings for meetings, so in those meetings they discuss what they will discuss on the other meetings!
Also, there are some other sinister reasons, an email is an artifact that can be traced and searched, a meeting usually is just verbal communication and even meeting minutes get challenged later.
> The real solution is to simply fire these people.
I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.
If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.
If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.
>There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.
There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.
Email chains can fail to converge. Yeah, the meeting could have been an email, but what if it was going to be 20 email back-and-forths? And not everybody is responding quickly?
You ask three people what we should do about a problem. They float ideas. You think the discussion is converging on a solution, and then one of them (who hasn't been heard from for the last three days) suddenly protests where the group is going, saying that they don't agree at all, that they have several concerns, that nobody talked to this other group that needs to be consulted, and so on. Then for that other group, nobody responds for a week because they're busy on something else.
A meeting can force people to say what they have to say, now, or be ignored. That forcing function has value.
And it's not (just) that "people refuse to do anything". It's that multiple people, doing things asynchronously, on different time rhythms, sometimes means that the group consensus advances v e r y s l o w l y, if at all.
I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.
So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".
Most people just have no practice or experience writing. Asking them to respond to or write a large response to an email is a total non-starter for them. That's the default culture in the corporate world unless you have a strong company culture otherwise.
It’s about to get a lot worse too. Gen Z has had noticeably worse reading comprehension scores over the last 5-10 years and they are starting to enter the workforce now. Many prefer video over text and firmly believe that written text is “the harder medium”.
There is somebody that I am having to work with right now that will not respond to a single thing I ask unless it is on a live phone call.
I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.
We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.
He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)
It blew my mind to enter college and peer review other people's papers. Up until that point I understood that there was a range of capability with writing, but I figured that in college courses the floor would be pushed up. I was dead wrong, and it was shocking to me that these folks had managed to get all the way through high school writing like 8th graders.
ETA: This is over 20 years ago, btw. I hear it's gotten materially worse. That terrifies me.
Not advocating this, just more addressing the mindset on it, but in the game of office politics people don't mention concerns ahead of time because they don't want to give the opposing view point opportunity to research how to defeat their argument in a meeting, not that they "can't" give an intelligent response. They're ^choosing* not to in their own self interest.
"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle; for if he does not know where I intend to give battle, he must be prepared in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one-given place will be but few."
Anyone who would advocate for this strategy against any SME is a moron anyway.
It's like watching someone who's expecting a knife fight walk in with a concealed handgun only to be immediately confronted with a tank.
The email is usually an attempt to not waste time in the meeting and get shit done. Leadership always favors those who can make it so. Anyone who stalls for time or hides information will always look bad. I don't get why people so desperately try anyway.
Most of these strange gambits in office politics are a losing game for the inept and inexperienced. One can only wonder why we keep pretending like there even is such a "game" of office politics.
id place the reason that its more work to identify and raise those concerns ahead of time, since if they are correct, you did all that work coming up with the happy path and the issues ahead of time, vs if the issues come up later, you can focus on and fix them as they come up.
In this second case, some people live life only bothering to deal with crises, and delay anything else. It's likely not the direct threat of a meeting, but that you've made it clear it's a crisis.
this is to say that alignment and prioritization arent the same thing.
they agree to the thing, but making a meeting moves the priority from low to high because you are signalling through making a meeting that it is high priority
Your “well-written” problem statement will create thankless work for me that nobody will see or appreciate. I know this because “you” usually send me your “urgent” non-issues and (asinine) “solutions” but, being the diplomatic guy that I am and actually understanding the game that I am forced to play, in contrast to you, I will deny, deflect and if cornered, will call a meeting in what can only be described as some form of malicious corporate compliance. This is all because I am too polite and too political to just say “get lost”. I would if I could, but I can’t. “You” usually have some leverage because you are good with networks or the details of FreeBSD or whatever.
i recently decided to see if i could make an "agentic" NBER and use its agents to do research for my other agents in the agentic state. I would love to speak w/ someone there and show them the sims, I do not think all of the meetings are needed and eventually there will just be agent proxy meetings that send messages to some HITL when needed for more guidance, This cold put more value on the real meetings IMO.
Note: THIS IS JUST FOR FUN, because I needed an economic policy thinktank for my agents to query. I had to do the same for CEPR
Eh, i see it mostly as a delay tactic rather than anything else. After yhat, its a scheduling forcing method. Then lastly, they just are procrastinators so they use other peoples time as the ordering of their work.
pre wfh times the meetings were restricted by the capacity of the meeting rooms in the office. It also required more effort to coordinate, schedule, preparation, etc.
My dad used to joke that a meeting is where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
Buried in the pdf in different sections
> Managers attend meetings far more frequently and spend substantially more time in them than non-managerial employees.
> Separately, interactions with senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth
A meeting is called to coordinate or communicate. Wadge's law of meetings tell you which one is which.
But not all coordination is top down, sometimes you need your manager to go negotiate a point with another division.
And neither is all communication, most often you can impress on others the potential of a new approach or the problems with the existing one.
The only trouble for the neurodivergent among us is that "appearing to pay attention" is also communication, same goes for eye-contact or not stuttering.
Corolllary is that skip meetings at your own risk, decisions will be made and you won't be in the room where it happens. And don't be the person who is not welcome in meetings, that too eventually makes your pay suffer.
I am one of today's Ten Thousand (https://xkcd.com/1053/) to just now learn of this law.
"Wadge’s Law (of Meetings).
Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.
This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisions of the pre meeting are made. Maybe even a pre pre pre meeting … until you reach some guy deciding everything in the shower."
A less cynical way to put this is that it's a type of socialization (in an organizational context): the process of sharing and building internal consensus around a new concept.
That can take many forms, but communication before a big meeting is common because if you're announcing a new idea, you want people to support it, and springing it on everyone for the first time in a big meeting is just gambling.
Figure 3 is interesting. After manager vs non-manager, the strongest predictor of meeting load is whether the work is in-office or remote, with remote & hybrid workers having both more and (much) longer meetings on average. That lines up with my experience, and is one of the big reasons I dislike hybrid work in particular.
I doubt their data would have supported this, but I do wish they had distinguished hybrid from fully distributed. Anecdotally, the one time I worked at a 100% distributed organization the meetings were efficient and the meeting load was low. Not quite as low as the fully in-office companies, but I think some of that was that we deliberately padded meetings with some social time as a stand-in for the water cooler.
Because we're social creatures. We're desperate to foster and measure social consensus. That's why we have so many meetings. We want to see the agreement / concession / enthusiasm / disagreement on people's faces, and then use the social forum to cow them into assenting.
Because this is a base intuition and inclination, we employ this clumsily even in cases where it's not really the right tool for the job.
It's a joke, but taking it at face value, many informational emails are not written in a way that suggests a reply is wanted or necessary, in as much as many meetings are just something you sit through as a listener and not as an active participant.
If an email presents some new plan or policy as a "done deal" then what is the point of spending time replying to it?
I firmly believe 20 minutes is the optimal amount of time to meet, introduce a problem and evidence, and make a decision that allows all parties to move forward aligned.
I suspect office work defaulted to 30 minute calls because of TV/Radio broadcasts in the early 20th century, but I haven't researched this theory further.
What's particularly annoying is once the meeting is arbitrarily scheduled in for say an hour then many feel the need to drag the meeting out over that entire hour regardless of if everything important has been covered within 20 minutes. Along with this comes the annoying trend of the meeting organiser 'giving you time back' if they conclude the meeting slightly early as if they are doing you a favour for not running the meeting for the entire duration when really that should be the default.
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
I have recently learned that meetings help with one thing we're really bad at, which is deadline and estimations.
Not meetings about deadline, or meetings about estimation, but the shared experience of having timed events associated with stakeholders and involved parties.
It's like an invisible cue system the brain adapts to and starts reacting/responding to in the form of scheduling and resource allocation. (Which can be a double edged sword for some people: e.g. when they wait until the meeting to ask a question)
Because companies are too big, there is a lot of dead weight, overlapping responsibilities, and differing opinions. It's a hiring, management, and culture issue. Smaller companies have it better, and AI helps with that.
As our economy becomes more and more riddled with nonsense jobs that provide no economic value, it becomes increasingly important for the people in those jobs to create the impression of value (this is their only product), and that's what meetings are largely for. Excessive pointless meetings are not broccoli, even if meeting-attenders see higher wage growth than their peers. Excessive meetings are a symptom of an economy that's becoming more and more disconnected from the real world and from creation of real economic value.
A big reason is a lack of agency. I work with large organisations where people cannot or do not know if they can make an executive decision. What to do? Call a meeting with everyone who might have a view on it so that you can then make a decision.
The problem, of course, is when an important person is not available so a decision is not made and then when something comes up mid-week, we need to wait another week to have another meeting.
Give people guiderails, let them try (and fail sometimes) and watch them flourish. On the other hand, tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
The problem is failure seems more costly than the 30-120 minute call that may align all necessary parties. I think a lot of effective work cultures have moved towards the "move fast and expect mistakes" mentality you describe, but most people/organizations are still carrying mentalities from the "old ways"
It's also about lack of leadership and (true) strategy. Many large organizations just careen from "crisis" to "crisis" and are extremely reactive; lacking a long term strategy and clear plan, it becomes extremely hard to actually make decisions.
People endlessly defer because they don't want to be the person to "take the blame" for a decision. Making decisions when you don't connect them to an actual goal/plan/vision becomes a liability. The solution is endless meetings where liability is distributed to...everyone in the meeting. It's successful, in a way, but also exhausting and makes you feel like your job involves just tilting at windmills (imaginary crises).
you have so many meetings because you send billions of messages that have NO value, but create a wild number of different expectations accross the spread of those involved in any one project, and so meetings are one way to try and get people on the same page.
but off course there are now millions of people entrenched in organisations who are messaging and meeting specialists,and for whom procedural tacticts are instinctive and will only defer and conduct actual work when under direct supervision from a superior.
I could talk about how deal with some of that, but, no.
The paper seems like a high school science project, but in my experience one common reason for having a meeting is this: Person A wants Person B (Person C's boss) to tell Person C to do something. That's it. So Person A slacks or emails Person B saying I need to get Person C to do this thing. Person B says oh we better have a meeting. The three get onto the meeting and Person B says "yeah so Person A was talking about this thing, I'm not really sure what it is...". And the meeting ends with Person C saying "ok I will do that".
All of this can be avoided in my experience by creating a culture of task assignment. Often I've seen the bug/issue tracking system used to facilitate this but you can use other applications. In this scenario Person A would open a bug detailing what they want done, and either assign it, or put it in the triage queue so Person B get assigned next. Person B reviews, makes any notes, then assigns to Person C. That's it. No meeting.
Why do I feel every meeting has a rambling motormouth that will speak for at least 80% of the meeting, making the most obvious, remedial "points" (with illustrative anecdotes of course and repeating them over and over) and then keep the meeting running late?
This sounds like a former CEO I used to work with. Huddled an entire team into a meeting g bc he wanted an update, proceeded to talk through 80% of the meeting time.
End result: someone was appointed to send an email with the update.
People with no social lives outside of work tend to do that. They have no one to talk to other then on meetings, so they talk a lot on meetings. They are not aware of what they are doing, but it is a consistent pattern.
TL;DR People are pushed to specialize as companies grow and meetings are cartesian products of interests.
As responsibilities become increasingly important (more financial import), their work is divided into specialized slices for optimization, redundancy, and bus factor. The number of combinations of people that might be necessary to answer questions or provide guidance in decisioning expands exponentially (small slope, correlating to recruitment). If something in a meeting is considered missed, unsaid, or backtracked, the event is memorialized and pushes for more meeting with a larger audience. The people in large meetings self-select into smaller meetings around their specific vertical interests, in order to align with the interpreted decisions of the larger meetings.
Meeting bloat is the result of a conflux of human behavior, lossy communication, optimized behavior and competing interests. If it was a simple single reason, humans would have solved it long ago.
The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. And face-to-face communication is often a better vehicle for it than written communication.
One thing that I've been wondering is if I could somehow transmit everything in my head somehow automatically into text so that an LLM can reasonably respond to almost everything about what I'm doing and how updated live to other people. Perhaps it could escalate the things that matter to me and meetings would be transformed so that others could pull things out of me faster than having to talk to me. I might even be completely obviated by sufficient encoding of self.
Perhaps the visible actions and text I write are all holographic-principle-like sufficient encoding of my invisible prior thought given sufficient information. Curious to see!
We are not even remotely near the point of being able to interpret the complexities of thought in a way that we can transmit them outside of the head automatically.
Simple commands, maybe some voluntary muscle control. But nothing as complex as 'What are the pros and cons of these two business approaches?'
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 51.5 ms ] threadI work with people that...
* When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
* Will ignore requests to review PRs, or look into problems, for weeks on end. When I ask "what would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?", they'll suddenly spring into action, or say that a meeting is not necessary, but prove that in fact it is by refusing to do anything before the prospect of a meeting is raised.
but also, you arent really blcoked on anyones review. just open a fork of their service and run a copy on your own team
The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.
Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world
You need to figure out which people are which type. You seem to be a “this could have been an e-mail” type of person. So am I. But my wife is a talker.
For some of those talkers, they actually need to see your face and not just hear your voice. Otherwise, they feel like they’re not getting any information from you.
And for some of those people, it has to be in-person, a video call won’t do — they can’t see your entire environment around you and all the things you can see which they cannot.
To be fair, over 90% of all human communication is not verbalized — it’s in the expression on their face, the way they look around the room, what they’re looking at while they’re talking to you, your body language, the faces you’re making when they are the one talking, etc….
Of the remainder, over 90% is not the actual text of the words being spoken, it’s in the delivery of the words, your tone of voice, are you speaking quickly or slowly, etc….
So, those of us who are on the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum, we are depending solely on the text in front of us, which is about 1% of the total information that could have been conveyed through non-textual and non-audio parts of the process.
If you’re okay with that, then that’s great! But that only works with other people who are on that end of the spectrum.
So, to get back to my earlier point — you need to know what type of person you are, and you need to know what type of person the other person/people is/are. And you need to adapt your communication style to suit them. Or, make sure that they understand where your limits are and how far you can adapt, and then it’s up to them to try to adapt the rest of that distance.
My wife and I are about to celebrate our 27th anniversary. We are still very much a “work in process” on this topic. I am no expert, but I do have decades of experience with hard lessons that I’ve learned over the years.
"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"
"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"
"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".
The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.
Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.
It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.
My solutions to these problems are thus:
1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.
2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.
3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.
4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.
Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".
Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.
You hit the nail on this, a lot coming from middle managers too who still think that a busy calendar of these meetings it means they are very productive. I remember a manager I worked with, he was so keen on having meetings, a discussion between me and a colleague and he overheard it? Meeting to discuss “the conflict”!! It was soul crushing experience thankfully i left quickly, only to know later he started having meetings for meetings, so in those meetings they discuss what they will discuss on the other meetings!
Also, there are some other sinister reasons, an email is an artifact that can be traced and searched, a meeting usually is just verbal communication and even meeting minutes get challenged later.
The solution? Blast the PR into your shared slack noting that it isn't being reviewed on time because maybe XYZ person is busy.
Watch how fast they are suddenly free to review when their name is attached to something in public.
The real solution is to simply fire these people. There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.
If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.
If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.
This is absolutely not true. If I can’t check in a fix or a feature because someone else isn’t doing the review, it’s definitely still my problem.
Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.
There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.
It could be more productive than being angry. Or not, but worth a try.
You ask three people what we should do about a problem. They float ideas. You think the discussion is converging on a solution, and then one of them (who hasn't been heard from for the last three days) suddenly protests where the group is going, saying that they don't agree at all, that they have several concerns, that nobody talked to this other group that needs to be consulted, and so on. Then for that other group, nobody responds for a week because they're busy on something else.
A meeting can force people to say what they have to say, now, or be ignored. That forcing function has value.
And it's not (just) that "people refuse to do anything". It's that multiple people, doing things asynchronously, on different time rhythms, sometimes means that the group consensus advances v e r y s l o w l y, if at all.
So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".
I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.
We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.
He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)
Called, no answer, left voicemail
Billed 15 minutes
ETA: This is over 20 years ago, btw. I hear it's gotten materially worse. That terrifies me.
"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle; for if he does not know where I intend to give battle, he must be prepared in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one-given place will be but few."
It's like watching someone who's expecting a knife fight walk in with a concealed handgun only to be immediately confronted with a tank.
The email is usually an attempt to not waste time in the meeting and get shit done. Leadership always favors those who can make it so. Anyone who stalls for time or hides information will always look bad. I don't get why people so desperately try anyway.
Most of these strange gambits in office politics are a losing game for the inept and inexperienced. One can only wonder why we keep pretending like there even is such a "game" of office politics.
id place the reason that its more work to identify and raise those concerns ahead of time, since if they are correct, you did all that work coming up with the happy path and the issues ahead of time, vs if the issues come up later, you can focus on and fix them as they come up.
i dont think the meeting is in focus at all
Make sure to actually say “autopsy”.
“Inquisition” and “colonoscopy” work well too.
But have a practice of letting such meetings be cancelled if the work is done and went well.
they agree to the thing, but making a meeting moves the priority from low to high because you are signalling through making a meeting that it is high priority
Your “well-written” problem statement will create thankless work for me that nobody will see or appreciate. I know this because “you” usually send me your “urgent” non-issues and (asinine) “solutions” but, being the diplomatic guy that I am and actually understanding the game that I am forced to play, in contrast to you, I will deny, deflect and if cornered, will call a meeting in what can only be described as some form of malicious corporate compliance. This is all because I am too polite and too political to just say “get lost”. I would if I could, but I can’t. “You” usually have some leverage because you are good with networks or the details of FreeBSD or whatever.
Note: THIS IS JUST FOR FUN, because I needed an economic policy thinktank for my agents to query. I had to do the same for CEPR
https://nber.dev
Now just a click and summon people.
Buried in the pdf in different sections
> Managers attend meetings far more frequently and spend substantially more time in them than non-managerial employees.
> Separately, interactions with senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth
A meeting is called to coordinate or communicate. Wadge's law of meetings tell you which one is which.
But not all coordination is top down, sometimes you need your manager to go negotiate a point with another division.
And neither is all communication, most often you can impress on others the potential of a new approach or the problems with the existing one.
The only trouble for the neurodivergent among us is that "appearing to pay attention" is also communication, same goes for eye-contact or not stuttering.
Corolllary is that skip meetings at your own risk, decisions will be made and you won't be in the room where it happens. And don't be the person who is not welcome in meetings, that too eventually makes your pay suffer.
"Wadge’s Law (of Meetings).
Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.
This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisions of the pre meeting are made. Maybe even a pre pre pre meeting … until you reach some guy deciding everything in the shower."
https://billwadge.com/2015/10/28/wadges-laws/
(pretty fun read, thanks)
That can take many forms, but communication before a big meeting is common because if you're announcing a new idea, you want people to support it, and springing it on everyone for the first time in a big meeting is just gambling.
I doubt their data would have supported this, but I do wish they had distinguished hybrid from fully distributed. Anecdotally, the one time I worked at a 100% distributed organization the meetings were efficient and the meeting load was low. Not quite as low as the fully in-office companies, but I think some of that was that we deliberately padded meetings with some social time as a stand-in for the water cooler.
Because this is a base intuition and inclination, we employ this clumsily even in cases where it's not really the right tool for the job.
What bothers me most about meetings is their duration. There's no need to schedule hour-long meetings.
If an email presents some new plan or policy as a "done deal" then what is the point of spending time replying to it?
I suspect office work defaulted to 30 minute calls because of TV/Radio broadcasts in the early 20th century, but I haven't researched this theory further.
So finish them.
"What else is on the agenda?"
"Have we covered off everything?"
"Let's schedule a separate session for that."
"I think we're aligned. Let's wrap up early."
Etc.
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
Getting work done will require combination of biological and silicon agents working together.
Will our silicon counterparts also want as many meetings as biological equivalent to get the same work done?
Not meetings about deadline, or meetings about estimation, but the shared experience of having timed events associated with stakeholders and involved parties.
It's like an invisible cue system the brain adapts to and starts reacting/responding to in the form of scheduling and resource allocation. (Which can be a double edged sword for some people: e.g. when they wait until the meeting to ask a question)
- Talking is confused with doing
- Design / Decision by committee alone is the path of progress, including attempts to improve itself.
The problem, of course, is when an important person is not available so a decision is not made and then when something comes up mid-week, we need to wait another week to have another meeting.
Give people guiderails, let them try (and fail sometimes) and watch them flourish. On the other hand, tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
People endlessly defer because they don't want to be the person to "take the blame" for a decision. Making decisions when you don't connect them to an actual goal/plan/vision becomes a liability. The solution is endless meetings where liability is distributed to...everyone in the meeting. It's successful, in a way, but also exhausting and makes you feel like your job involves just tilting at windmills (imaginary crises).
I could talk about how deal with some of that, but, no.
All of this can be avoided in my experience by creating a culture of task assignment. Often I've seen the bug/issue tracking system used to facilitate this but you can use other applications. In this scenario Person A would open a bug detailing what they want done, and either assign it, or put it in the triage queue so Person B get assigned next. Person B reviews, makes any notes, then assigns to Person C. That's it. No meeting.
End result: someone was appointed to send an email with the update.
It's the laziest and easiest way to get alignment.
Plus, Not everyone hates it.
It's nice to finally ask Mr A why they said Mr B should be working on login v2 instead of fixing bug b.
Management feels empowered and feels like they know what's going on if everyone meets.
As responsibilities become increasingly important (more financial import), their work is divided into specialized slices for optimization, redundancy, and bus factor. The number of combinations of people that might be necessary to answer questions or provide guidance in decisioning expands exponentially (small slope, correlating to recruitment). If something in a meeting is considered missed, unsaid, or backtracked, the event is memorialized and pushes for more meeting with a larger audience. The people in large meetings self-select into smaller meetings around their specific vertical interests, in order to align with the interpreted decisions of the larger meetings.
Meeting bloat is the result of a conflux of human behavior, lossy communication, optimized behavior and competing interests. If it was a simple single reason, humans would have solved it long ago.
Perhaps the visible actions and text I write are all holographic-principle-like sufficient encoding of my invisible prior thought given sufficient information. Curious to see!
Simple commands, maybe some voluntary muscle control. But nothing as complex as 'What are the pros and cons of these two business approaches?'