Some days at work I’ve got only half-hour gaps between meetings. I don’t care how adept people are at taking meetings, no one is going to get proper thinking work done in those gaps. If it was repetitive work, sure, you could get back into the groove of things, but even that takes some wind up time. Even worse if you’re in-office and expected to attend the meetings in-person.
It’s not uncommon for me to only have one or two 30-minute breaks between 8:30am and 5pm. I’ve gotten to the point that if I have over 2 hours without meetings I often feel like I get nothing done, because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a few things (emails or messages, not deep work) knocked out in the 5-10 min in between calls. I can only really focus on deeper work at night after everyone else has signed off.
Not really a sustainable way of doing work, I’m also not doing as much hands-on work these days. A lot of my meeting time is 1-on-1s with my team and making sure they have what they need to move forward, make decisions, and get work done or with other people to try to remove barriers to help the team be able to move forward. So in that sense, the meetings ARE the work.
You are a Scrum master, Rey.
lol, seems like it. Pretty sure you’re just saying it as a clever pun, but in reality I would hate being an actual Scum Master! I’m a Lead Product Manager over four dev teams with a team of 3 PMs. I am trying to focus on longer-term strategy and removing barriers for my team, while the PMs who report to me should be the ones making decisions and doing the individual contributor work.
I meant Scrum master literally (What is a Scrum Master? | Scrum.org), but it sounds you’re position is above that.
Ah, I read the italics as sarcasm and was trying to make sense of it in that way. I know what a Scrum Master is; my company doesn’t have them, so their responsibilities are spread across multiple roles. But yeah, my role is higher. I’m not helping the team with processes, I’m working with Directors and VPs on the business side to determine where the product is going. So planning side, not delivery side.
Replace Call with Zoom meeting.
A bit of an exaggeration but a lot of people will never understand that some people do not have much of a social battery left at the end of the day.
I have had so many people including rl friends, exs, or people I used to play online games with fail to understand that I don’t have that much energy in the evenings or even on the weekends sometimes. There’s dealing with my boss, dealing with my coworkers, dealing with people from other firms. Sometimes through teams, sometimes through the phone, sometimes in person.
Inaccurate the whole screen isn’t blue
The prep and recovery blocks are also team calls; everyone prepares and recovers together, moderated by the scrum master.
Introverts working at a call center.
“Just make shorter call.”
That’s even worse.
