Missing the dip before the meeting where you have to prepare for the meeting.
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
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.
I thought it was representing an unplanned “quick sync”.
As someone with ADHD zero work gets done until the meeting. It’s just waiting and stressing about missing the time.
Either;
A. You don’t take on any new tasks before the meeting. You’re already too distracted by the meeting to start anything new. So now you’re sitting there killing time for an hour until the meeting starts. You were doodling in a notepad, missed the start of the meeting, and joined 5 minutes late.
B. You were working on something and didn’t realise it was meeting time. Someone messages you 5 minutes after the meeting started, reminding you to join. You’ve completely forgotten what the meeting is about and it takes you a further 5 minutes to get your bearings.
You made me realize the office provided cues and support. If others were collecting their desk, even if for another meeting, it was clear we were 5 to 10 from the half hour. Also, you grabbed your friends on the way. You hustled earlier to get a good seat. You planned breaks, walks, etc to time around you getting back at a certain time. Comparatively, WFH is an unstructured ADHD hell sometimes.
My meetings don’t even last 5 mins. I have an alarm 5 minutes before the meeting so I can’t forget about it. If I miss it, someone messages me 30 seconds in. Then at 10:05 we all start working.
The time after the meeting is spent not wanting to engage in tasks you can’t accomplish before end of day, and watching the clock knowing the meeting screwed up the day.
Yeah my first thought was that this looks like an extremely optimistic take drawn by somebody without the issue.
Even having plans AFTER work can mess things up.
For software engineers, problem is management thought you could just hire a ton of people to solve the problem. Then the people who could actually solve the problem are stuck in meetings all day explaining it to people who can’t even understand the problem you keep explaining to them. Fun times.
The good old Mythical Man Hour.
(In simple terms, as the number of people increases, the communications overheads also increase, generally faster, so if you have more people a greater proportion of time is wasted, hence work done doesn’t increase proportionally to the number of people. Or if you just want to inform management that more people won’t simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of “If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn’t mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month”)
Diminishing Returns is the concept on a broader scale here
Ie: the more you add the less you get from adding, to the point of it becoming a complete negative
Or if you just want to inform management that more people won’t simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of “If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn’t mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month”
Management: “I don’t have time for theoretical discussions. Marketing says this releases in two weeks and you better get it done. Do you need more resources?”
“It can’t be done in this time frame.”
“Should’ve come and asked the experts how long would it take before accepting marketing’s estimates”
“So either find us more time or chose what we’re going to drop for the release”
And yeah, I’ve used this. (Then again, I’m pretty senior and seen and done a lot)
The people that don’t understand the problem usually are management, and I have to spend an exhausting time each day explaining to them why the problem exists and why it takes so long to fix it. I once was honestly telling them their meetings were a big part of the delays. Which then obviously led to more meetings on “how we can better communicate so we can have less meetings and more productive time”. I wish I was joking.
The problem with communication we have is the people who received the information are too dumb to understand said information
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
What is your job? If those meetings are just 30 minutes that’s already 5 hours.
Product Manager
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
At least an e-mail is documentation at the same time. In most meetings no one is actually taking any notes and nothing of value is created.
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.
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.
I’ve found medication helps the most lol
Some drugs help, but only if you can get the person organizing the meeting to take them.
Here comes the juice!
Yeah sure, medication can help!
I’ve had had to stop medication due to high blood pressure.
Yippeeeeeeee!
I mean, can’t you just take HBP meds?
Every medication has conflicts and side effects, ranging from vitamin absorption changes to actual risk of death depending on your situation. Adding another medication adds to the complications, in a 1+1=3 kind of way.
The more you keep going, the more you’re taking on. Soon it becomes a “do I like living or do I want to kill my liver for X benefit” choice. “Brain-zap effects or suicidal thoughts?” (Or, with effexor, both!)
So tread carefully.
Yes medications have potential side effects, but HBP meds have been around for decades, are well studied and shown to be preferable versus the known outcomes of untreated hypertension.
Hypertension will fuck you up way more than taking an additional medication will. On the topic od the liver, It actually causes new blood vessels to be made to circumvent the liver which leads to more waste in bloodstream not being filtered out.
more waste in bloodstream not being filtered out
But that also doesn’t sound like a good thing
Oh yeah sorry, was not trying to present the process as positive…blood should not be circumventing the liver.
This is why you make your own work better, improve the team’s work, and position yourself as a candidate for team lead by insisting that meeting timeboxes are enforced.
Even if it breaks productivity by cutting things off the first few times, it will train everyone to get to the point, which will make everything better after the first few breakages.
The more I see ADHD shitposts, the more I think I have it.
This isn’t adhd it is the legit flow from after a bullshit meeting. Then by the time you get ramped back up again it’s the next meeting.
My only gripe to the chart is there should be some flat lining down near the bottom on the productivity side as a buffer pre and post. You spend time doing nothing wondering why you need to attend during pre-meeting time then during post-meeting time, doing nothing thinking about how you weren’t necessary at that meeting. Then you begin the accel ramping.
Yup. and some meetings you people ask you a question so you legit need some time to think about what information you should look up before the meeting. Even if 95% of the time nobody asks you anything, you gotta take some time to think about the topic the meeting is on and whether there might be a question for you so you have the answer for that 5% of the time. But 100% of the time you have to stop and consider what the meeting is about beforehand for the 5% of the time there’s an actual question.
Also when I know I have a meeting coming up, I don’t want to get in too deep on something that takes a lot of focus.
yeah these memes are wayy to relatable
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.
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.
Sounds like that should be someone’s full time job, not pulling someone else away from their actual job.
If only. The past couple jobs I’ve had, everyone acts as if they have multiple jobs. It’s a rare privilege to be focused on a few responsibilities only.
Or put it in a list or have a dedicated morning for the bugs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Interruptions suck for office jobs
- Check flow state citations in intro
- Search for “lean [your field]” and whichever lean principle you’re curious about
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.
Interruptions suck for office jobs
Bullshit. Unsourced, but I think I found the study. Sample size: 48 college kids pretending to do a job they have no experience in. Besides, they found that interrupted work gets done faster at the same quality when interrupted! Not that I agree with such a limited study, but if I did, it would support what I’m saying.
Check flow state citations in intro
Sure, “flow” is a thing, but intense, focused concentration on a single task is a small minority of jobs, as I alluded to in my last comment. Most jobs (especially office jobs) require quickly swapping between several different mental points of focus.
Search for “lean [your field]” and whichever lean principle you’re curious about
The least productive meeting I’ve ever had was where my company brought in some Lean specialist and paid him more money than I think I want to know about to have us play card games and sell us on some oversimplified bullshit that we all promptly forgot after the next day, and gave us some cool certificates. It’s a way of thinking about things and organizing priorities that is resonable if you’re not an idiot but overly restrictive if you dogmatically adhere to it (which you will do, if you’re an idiot). Lean consists of a lot of good ideas that a smart manager will listen to and attempt to implement because they’re just good ideas. If you need it wrapped up in a package and labeled as “lean” then you’re not a good manager.
I feel like all the various “how to do your job” philosophies are a lot like diets. Sure, they all have pros and cons and some are better researched than other but 98% of it is just make sure calories in < calories out. Picking specific diets is just gonna change that other 2%. For work, the 98% is just “do your job, if a problem comes up fix it”. The obvious prerequisite to that is knowledge and ability; a lot of companies are so siloed that individual workers don’t understand where they fit in with the company’s goals, and that’s an institutional problem. And by ability I don’t just mean competence, I also mean things like having the permission to fix problems without manager approval, etc. Or the ability to go to someone on another team without having to route everything through your respective managers.
To bring that back to meetings specifically, there’s a lot of bullshit meetings out there, I think we all agree on that. But they shouldn’t kill your productivity for the rest of the day (or leading up to the meeting). That’s not normal. That’s why we’re in the ADHD community with this post. Minor interruptions may stop your “flow”, and if you’re in one of those jobs where you need it, that’s not good. But for most jobs, you don’t need flow. You need flexibility. Minor interruptions should not prevent you from doing your job. For a lot of jobs, minor interruptions are the job, or a critical part of it.
All of the science isn’t based on a single study with fifty college kids. Here’s another one and another one and another one and a meta study. Since you disagree with accepted science and literature, I’m gonna disengage. If you’d like to provide more than your interpretation of the world, I’d be happy to continue. I’d take some analysis on cognitive load, maybe some understanding that people other than you exist, certainly less rambling about a specific bad experience(s) you’ve had with explicit methodologies.
I recall going to a time management seminar. The speaker said, “When the average interrupted during a task, even momentarily, the time it takes the person to get back on task is between 20-60 minutes, and can take longer”
Yeah, this isn’t an ADHD meme, this is a “normal human behavior” meme.
This is great, also if you haven’t read it, you should read Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule by Paul Graham, it really helped me describe this concept to all of the managers I have had hah.
Well, damn, I’ve never seen that put so clearly before. I literally have been trying to schedule myself like a manager using half-day increments like a maker.
Right? It minorities blew my mind when I read it the first time and keeping that in mind has made my life so much easier overall, and definitely made it easier to describe to managers over the years.
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
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…
Two meetings a day sounds like luxury to me! I don’t have ADHD but meetings still absolutely kill my productivity. The switching penalty for technical tasks is much higher than non-technical people realise.
Some meetings are for:
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Project Planning
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Roadmaps
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Brainstorming
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Project-Milestone-Task breakdowns
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Issue-Triage work
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Budgetary allocations
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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.
No the worst meeting is when the entire team — CEO, CTO, sales, engineering — spend all of Friday (every Friday) divvying up the tabs in a big excel spreadsheet, going and re-going through workflow checklists.
I knew they had no automated tests when I joined. I was promised, when I joined, that I’d be allowed to spend at least 25% of my time building an automated test suite for our app.
But we never had time to allow me to do that. So instead of spending 25% of my time developing an automated suite, which would steadily reduce the following until it was zero, we spent 20% of the entire company’s time doing human rspec tests.
One time the CTO asked me “Why wasn’t this caught in testing?” and I said “Because we don’t do any testing”
Damn sounds too familiar 👀
Also, I agreed to only take 2/3 of my salary until a funding round came in. The promise was as soon as that hit, I’d go to 100% of our agreed salary.
Funding was eventually secured (thanks in no small part to me) and they tried to say “we’ll see” on the salary increase, so I just quit.
Huh. In theory, at least. In IT I’ve really only seen the status/blamestorm sessions. If I suggest that meetings aren’t a good use of time, it’s from that bias.
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Avoid morning meetings like the plague. The first four hours of a work day are golden and should be reserved for creativity and nothing else. The agile process was instituted at our workplace and that startup meeting is an absolute menace. I’ll tell you how the day is going in the afternoon but right now I have to work.
Idk, our agile meetings are 5 minutes long, and it feels like a start to the day for me. Before the meeting I don’t feel like doing anything.
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.
The shitty part to those workplaces is that chitchat often helps your employment more than actually doing work. Likeable people get promoted, effective workers stay where they’re at.
That’s a terrible workplace culture, but it’s fairly common.
I will say that the support I got from co-workers when I was no longer working there. I got a number of messages about how disappointed they were about losing me from the team, etc.
None of that helped me find new employment, nor did it help me move up while I was there, but I was well liked.
