A casual community for people with ADHD
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I have found that if the meeting is actually quick (sub 20 minutes) rebounding is not as difficult. When the "quick meeting" turns into a check in + "do we have time to talk about..." + any other number of meandering paths a meeting can travel down, I'll have a hard time getting back into task mode.
Something that helps me is to take a walk right after those meetings. Helps me reset when I get back to my desk.
Some meetings are for:
Project Planning
Roadmaps
Brainstorming
Project-Milestone-Task breakdowns
Issue-Triage work
Budgetary allocations
Priority item tracking
There are many many important meetings to have and to get done. The worst meeting you can have is a status-update call where you mark off items on a checklist. This can be done by automation and status-tracker boards.
This is why I can't work in an office. The last one I worked in, people kept waking up to chat "for a sec", when it took at least 10 minutes regardless of the inquiry.
Just as I'm starting to get myself back into my workflow.... "Hey, you got a sec?"
Sure, looks like I'm not going to get anything fucking done today, so why the fuck not. The only people I'm disappointing is the employer. I can have a chat. It's fine. Not like this will negatively affect my ongoing employment.
Yeah, I have to wrap up what I'm working on so that I can be available for the "quick meeting" which usually means I'm doing nothing for 15-20 minutes as I can't get started on anything else. If I'm caught not doing well, I get in trouble for the productivity, so I have to pretend.
When the 5-10 minute meeting runs closer to 45, I'm out an hour I could have been working.
Not the end of the world, but when we have these at least once, if not twice a day...
Meetings are rarely productive for anyone, neurotypical or not, once it gets bigger than like five people and/or hierarchy enters the room imo. Then it morphs into politics and showmanship.
Best meeting I’ve ever had was with two engineers. We were all on time, had prepared well, and lasted seven minutes because there were zero pleasantries, got right into breaking down the subject, and the answer was frank and forthright.
Sales team? Forget about keeping to schedule
I have about 3 meetings a week because I keep only the productive ones. I refuse to attend bullshit meetings.
My graph would look like the first one except after the meeting there's a huge burst of activity because now everyone is more informed about what needs to be done and how to do it.
To be fair, my work has a culture of ridigly policing meetings to keep them on topic, no chitchat, no rambling, anyone who starts that tends to get called out immediately.
I had a former workplace like that, it was beautiful 🥹
We had a hot seat meeting where each department representative wasn’t even in the room until their individual staggered start time kicked in. One out, one in, cycling through each department until the meeting was over. They get to go back to their work and not be ‘meat’ in the room for fifteen minutes or more, we got focused reports from each as they filed in and out.
Sometimes I miss working for Germans, but “alles in Ordnung” cuts both ways - good luck breaking through the bureaucracy reporting chain and getting quick results
I typically have 8-10 meetings a day. I try to either have 60-90 min in the morning and/or 60-90 at the end of the day for focus time... Unfortunately the end of day sometimes gets nuked because I am fried from all of the meetings
My old job I used to have a lot of days where I'd have meetings every half hour or often consecutively. It was impossible to actually get anything big done because I'd just always be organizing notes from the last one or prepping for the next one. I between it was all I could do to put out fires. It was insane.
What is your job? If those meetings are just 30 minutes that's already 5 hours.
Stand up / syncs / recruiter meetings / follow ups - they are usually only 15 minutes, so you can churn em out. They are easier to do than a daily email
Product Manager
I'm lucky to not have many meetings in my current dev job, but I get the same effect from having a dozen people a day asking for "quick" fixes for various bugs that are conveniently always more urgent than whatever big task I'm in the middle of.
Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?
Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.
My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don't like it or disagree.
I don't respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I've hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.
And I don't actually work on any of those requests until there's a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn't done, I'm sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.
That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it's not always falling to you because you're not jaded enough to say no.
Jesus fuck I would hate to work with you. At my job there's a lot of teams working on a lot of projects with very tight deadlines, and if every request had to be routed through managers it would take 10x as long. When we ask people from other teams directly for help, "I'm sorry I'm too busy right now" is a perfectly acceptable response because we've all been there. We don't need our managers to act like playground referees.
We're all intelligent and capable workers and we get paid well to take initiative and solve things without running to mommy.
If every request is an emergency that needs to immediately interrupt everything else, then your throughput is drastically reduced. The extra cognitive load that comes from the interrupts also affects throughput. If you constantly have to watch DMs/channels/email for work that might pull you away from your existing work, you’re not hitting a deep work state.
Unless your role is intentionally interrupt-driven requests, it’s much better to drop items in a queue to be processed regularly. The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is. The last 30+ years of workflow research coupled with neuroscience have really highlighted the efficacy of queues.
If every request is an emergency, then your company is horrible at sharing info because teams don't know the overall goal of the company and where their team's "emergency" ranks in that. Something that's a high priority for my team might not be a high priority overall, and everyone on my team needs to understand when that is the case. There's been plenty of times when teams have had to rebalance priorities because someone with the ability to fix their blocker is tied up with something more important.
That's knowledge that shouldn't be exclusive to managers. There shouldn't be any need to involve managers in that other than to keep them informed of the situation.
The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is.
I heartily disagree. Queues might be good when all the humans involved are shit at their jobs (which admittedly is a lot of workspaces) but otherwise, inserting extra friction between problem and solution is not and cannot be helpful.
I also think a "deep work state" is a myth for anything except certain types of coding, lab work, etc that legitimately require a shift in mental focus due to the nature of the work. For the vast majority of jobs, work is work.
If you're a software programmer or a worker in an industrial factory, sure, you need uninterrupted time to get into the flow of things. For most jobs, interruptions are fine. You can prioritize and either shift focus or put the new request on the back burner.
(which by the way is where I think tickets excel: at keeping track of progress. Not at designating priority.)
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I’d really like to see some citations.
I know sharing facts won’t necessarily change your opinion; I wanted to highlight I’m not talking out of my ass to everyone else reading the thread.
Hahaha I wish. There isn't any real "management" to speak of where I'm at, and it's a flat structure, meaning literally anyone can send me work and I'm just expected to do it. Right now I'm working the weekend to finish a task that someone else couldn't do and it fell to me. There's a ticketing system, but it's only really half-used (of course, I myself turn these tasks into tickets, but that's about it).
Trying to slowly change all this over time, because I love my job outside of this lack of management, but I also don't hold any delusions about that.
My previous job didn't have a ticket tracker for my team. It was my first real job, so I didn't realize how far we were straying from best practices. If I had some more experience, I would have pushed hard for ticket tracking. I was constantly disorganized, and my manager blamed me for not keeping track of everything. He was probably in his 50's, he should have known better.
The bug fixes themselves can have massive cognitive overhead. I’ve spent hours thinking about a problem to make a very small change. It takes focus to fix complex problems correctly.
Missing the dip before the meeting where you have to prepare for the meeting.
I thought it was representing an unplanned "quick sync".
Yeah I was gonna say, just go ahead and mirror that and also make the ball sad
Same. Mine is an upside down bell curve.
Or the anxiety of what the meeting will be about that spans the entire morning beforehand.
Or keeping half your attention on the clock to leave at the right time
Yup. Thankfully management at my old job understood this, we had one quick 10 minute catchup about 30 minutes into the day every day and that was it. If a project required several meeting, they were all done as close together as possible over as few days as possible, leaving as many free full days as reasonably could be achieved. It worked really well