Meetings

Engineers do their best work in uninterrupted stretches. Meetings cost more than the calendar shows — a 30-minute meeting in the middle of the morning costs the two hours around it that never turn into deep work.

The one-hour target

Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule vs. Manager’s Schedule is the underlying idea — makers lose whole afternoons to a single mid-morning meeting, so what looks like a 30-minute cost on the calendar is often a three-hour cost in output. My target for individual contributors is a one-hour ceiling on scheduled meetings per day.

Ceiling, not law. Some weeks — interviewing, cross-timezone launches, on-call handoffs — break it, and that’s fine. But the default is one hour, and going past it should be a conscious call, not the calendar filling itself up.

Deep work in the morning, ops in the afternoon

I schedule everything I can — 1:1s, design reviews, planning — after lunch. Mornings are for the work that only they can do. This is not absolute; a synchronous cross-timezone call is what it is. But it’s the default, and I have to have a reason to break it.

Meetings without agendas get cancelled

If a meeting shows up on the calendar with no agenda and no pre-read, I decline and ask for one. This is not pedantry. It’s the difference between “we all show up and discover what we’re talking about” (60 minutes) and “we all show up having read the doc and disagree specifically about points 3 and 5” (20 minutes).

The pre-read is also a filter. Half the meetings that need an agenda turn out not to need a meeting once the agenda is written — the document was the meeting.

If they didn’t accept, they aren’t coming

I don’t hold a meeting hostage waiting for the person who might show up. If a decision needs a specific person and they haven’t accepted, I move the meeting. If they can’t come and the decision can’t wait, I make it and send them the outcome to object.

Silence is not consent, but it isn’t a veto either.

Red flags — signs the meeting culture is broken

More than one status meeting per week that’s the same people.
Recurring meetings nobody remembers the origin of.
“Quick sync” that’s actually 45 minutes.
Design reviews where the design is presented for the first time in the room.
Retros that produce the same action items as last time.
Anyone on the team saying “I can’t get real work done.”

Each of these has a specific fix. All of them start with someone willing to cancel a meeting.

What I do instead of a meeting

Async doc + 24-hour comment window. Works for anything where the reader has time to think.
A Loom. Works for anything visual — a design walk-through, a bug repro, a demo.
A written decision + “reply to disagree by Friday.” Works when the decision is 90% obvious and the meeting was going to be about the last 10%.

The right meeting-to-async ratio depends on the team, but the direction of the shift is always toward less synchronous time and more prepared time. Rarely the other way.