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> The people who I know did this missed very important details of meetings, and even has to be clued in that someone was speaking to them.

I agree. Few things annoy me more than having a meeting to discuss an issue. A big discussion occurs while a 1-N people are on their computers claiming the meeting is a waste of time so they need to be working instead. A decision is made and everyone leaves. Later, when the decision is about to be implemented/executed, people who said the meeting was a waste of time now make me re-hash the entire meeting because they disagree with the solution.

I've actually just started responding to these people that they should have paid attention at the time, because I have work to do.

Are not the meetings properly documented and the actions minuted?

Mostly, but the same people who don't pay attention are the same people who don't go and read minutes. Basically their time is more valuable than anyone else.

So have the Chair call them out on it - Gently at first if that doesn't work raised formally at their 121

I'm a Scrum Master who took over for a SM who was fired. The first thing I did was ban computers from the planning meetings.

Tangent, but several friends said I should look into being a Scrum Master. Any advice on where to start? I'm going to a meetup on it Tuesday.

That's a good start. You'll need to join the Scrum Alliance mostly because that's where employers look. Lots of info free online. Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

Your profile lacks an email or point of contact. Maybe I'm naive and don't see what you mean

>> "That might mean being on a conference call and also >>responding to emails (I’m happy listening and writing >>at the same time)".

>The people who I know did this missed very important >details of meetings, and even has to be clued in that >someone was speaking to them. They constantly relied on >others around them to pay attention to the important >details of any meeting. Definitely led to confusion and >issues (and blaming).

I have to agree. Certainly there are geniuses and other people out there who have "super-human abilities", but thats a very few people.

Troy could very well be one of them. But suggesting that this is "multi-tasking" is hiding the truth for the majority of people.

As you said, Ive known people who do this. They simply ignore one task while doing the other. It seems a bit naive of Troy to suggest this as a valid strategy.

  But suggesting that this is "multi-tasking" is hiding the
  truth for the majority of people. As you said, Ive known 
  people who do this. They simply ignore one task while 
  doing the other.

But that's all computers do. So using a definition of 'multi-tasking' that excludes that, you could say there is no thing as 'multi-tasking', unless you are able to juggle several tasks at once.

Which brings up a (few) problem(s) with that definition of 'multi-tasking'. Does that defintion define 'multi-tasking' as 'Doing two things at the same time', or 'Paying attention and doing two things at the same time'? If you use the former, then everyone everywhere multitasks when they decide to eat and walk, think about something and walk, etc.

If you decide to use the latter, then how do you define 'attention'? Is someone thinking about what to cook tonight while walking down the street really paying attention to where they're going?

The dissonance over meanings can easily be stemmed if you consider the second definition of the word 'multi-tasking'.

  2. The engaging in more than one activity at the same 
  time or serially, switching one's attention back and 
  forth from one activity to another.

Which means that 'ignoring one task while doing the other' is a perfectly valid form of multi-tasking.

I am not quite as interested in semantic accuracy as I am interested in the meaning of the advice itself.

Accepting your definition of multi-tasking, I simply will reword my objection: Dont suggest mutli-tasking is some virtuous and amazing quality.

in this definition, every single living being is probably multitasking... you, me, everybody

> I have to agree. Certainly there are geniuses and other people out there who have "super-human abilities", but thats a very few people.

> Troy could very well be one of them. But suggesting that this is "multi-tasking" is hiding the truth for the majority of people.

I honestly don't think this is true. Being bad at multitasking is simply part of being a human being. If you look into this you'll find people quite consistently overestimate their performance at multitasking and in fact do much more poorly at both tasks. They're just switching back and forth between the two, and the human brain does much more poorly with this context switch than computer processors do.

I mean I agree with the thrust of your post; I just don't agree with the idea that there are some supergeniuses who are an exception.

I don't think any study has shown that multi-tasking is faster/more efficient than sequentially processing tasks. However, that is quite different from saying some people are better at multi-tasking than others.

I remember reading a US air force study comparing fighter pilots to normal people and they found fighter pilots could multi-task much better than the average joe. I'll try and dig it up.

I can accept that some people are better at multi-tasking than others, but I don't think that anyone is better at multi-tasking than working sequentially, and I think that ends up being more important. The best multitaskers are a bit like the dogs best at walking on their hind legs.

Agreed. If you're responding to emails during a meeting, you are either missing important information from the meeting, writing bad email, or you don't need to be in the meeting in the first place.

Realistically the latter is extremely common in business settings. A small percentage of business meetings even need to happen, much less need the presence of all attendees.

This. 95% of meetings could be replaced by sending a couple of emails, or just paying attention to the bug tracker/version control system.

Or just paying attention and being focused in the first meeting.

Meetings are generally run by people that like to hear themselves talk. Those of us that have to get shit done don't get a lot of benefit from hearing people bikeshed and ramble for forty-five minutes or an hour, when you could write up the ideas discussed in a more concrete form in five minutes and email it around.

Text is a whole lot more efficient than talk. People actually have to present ideas in a coherent way when they are written down, since it's actually in a persistent form and doesn't admit the same hand-waviness and slop that speech does.

If you consider meetings as one-way communication then I understand that you think it is a waste of time. But if you are trying to understand what a non-technical customer actually needs, then a ten minute meeting might save you a hundred emails and a lot of grievances in the end. To write effective emails, you need to have a common language, which is missing more often than some people realize.

Many of those 95% happen because either:

1. People don't read their E-mails promptly or

2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail.

I've seen E-mail chains that lasted WEEKS, where a 45-minute meeting would have been enough to resolve the problem.

> 2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail.

Use IM, a chat room, whatever. Just use something that is persistent and can actually be referenced afterwards.

At which point, you might as well be in a physical meeting. You're either synchronously communicating (and not paying attention to something else) or you're not.

Except a physical meeting involves getting up from your desk, going somewhere, waiting around for everybody else to get there, having whatever meeting you're supposed to be having, hopefully without anyone taking it off the rails into some unrelated tangent, winding down the meeting, then going back to your desk. There's a lot of wasted time there, and I get very irritated by other people wasting my time.

Then there's the fact that nobody ever records the audio of in-person meetings, and almost never actually takes minutes or notes of what was decided, so the only record of it is the progressively hazy memories of the participants. So then you have another meeting next week to rehash the shit you just went over.

Besides the need for brief physical activity, these are people-problems and not problems specific to physical meetings.

Showing up late can happen in chat rooms.

Taking it off the rails into a tangent can happen in chat rooms.

Not ensuring accurate minutes are recorded is a failure of whoever is conducting the meeting, and should never happen.

I agree completely that these are people problems.

I have a huge preference for technical solutions that do the right thing by default, rather than trying to get people to do their jobs right. Most people are aggressively mediocre and don't seem to have any impulse to do their jobs in the most efficient way. So I can either get on their ass and chaff them along all the time to do things right, or you can use tools that make doing the right thing easier than not doing the right thing.

If that's the case, then isn't it part of the 5% that actually warrants a meeting?

Two things, was it something that needed to get done in the next 45 minutes? If not then a meeting is a big hammer for a small problem. If it only took 10 mins spread out over the course of several weeks it is still a time savings.

Second sure the discussion part could have been dealt with in a 45 minute meeting but how long did the thinking part take? Perhaps someone tested a few theories before presenting what they thought was the best approach in a short email. You aren't going to do that in a meeting you either end up taking the path of least resistance or you end up in another meeting after everyone has had a chance to go think and try stuff out.

"Two things, was it something that needed to get done in the next 45 minutes? If not then a meeting is a big hammer for a small problem. If it only took 10 mins spread out over the course of several weeks it is still a time savings."

Not true. There is an overhead to loading the relevant context into your brain each time you approach the issue.

Looking at an issue 10 times over the course of a month is typically going to take much longer "person time" than blocking out the time to look through an issue all at once.

Perhaps it's a combination of both?

Most of the meeting being irrelevant, and the quality of the email not mattering?

gotclocked.com

To be fair, I've known a handful of people who can do that effectively without getting lost. However, I'd say they are the minority and its really a "luck of genetics" thing rather than a learned skill.

No one I've met who claims it was a skilled they learned actually can do it. I'm willing to believe people exist who do, but I suspect they fall under the "luck of genetics" category and just convinced themselves they learned it. Or it could be a mix of both. However, 90% of people I've met that do it do meet the OP's "blindspot" criteria.

Genetics would def. be part of it, I think that's fair.

One person I'm thinking of in particular is VERY intelligent, which (unfortunately for those around them) helps them cope with (get away with) this behavior.

Everyone says that they can multi-task (maybe not everyone, but a lot), and in my long long old life, I've only met one person who could talk to me on the phone about weird music at the same time she was actively editing something that was going to go to trial the next day. And be fully active in both parts of this.

It was freaky.

I don't believe that most people can multi-task. I believe that one person can multi-task (that I have met), that some people can switch very quickly, and that the rest are delusional.

For myself, I can process vast amounts of information, and I can context switch, maybe slowly -- but I can't multi-task. After 40 years in the field - I'm not sure that many claimants can.

CMV: It's just a way for douches to say that they aren't paying attention.

It looks like Troy works from home, so he's got an advantage there.

Really the majority of the article is about time management, and he does make some good points, not that I agree with all of them.

For me, I had never heard about RescueTime before, so I think overall my life has been improved by checking this out.

Having worked from home for 11 years, it's no advantage. As much as possible, I try to divide the time between home office and somewhere else quiet cause, eventually, something needs to be done at home and ruins the rest of the day. The dog, the wife, the leaky faucet. It's something every day.

he multitasks all day, from 6am to 1am. Not a really great way of life.

he's really context switching constantly.

Which is actually far less efficient.

You're just speculating. None of this needs to be true in Troy's case.

Correct. It's based on personal experience. It just strongly resonated with me.

You're free to believe he's different from 99% of us in terms of ability to multi-task and work 16 hour days.