Re:The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones
by JohnBooty on Monday January 31, 2022 @10:38PM
(#30158343)
Sometimes, often even, there just isn't anything
that needs to be said. I feel the same way about
standups and 1:1s.
So end them early. Nothing wrong with ending a standup after a few minutes. Same with 1:1's.
Meetings should be treated like investments: by
spending the time of the participants, are you
going to reap the rewards of time saved in the future?
Agree with your premise; disagree with your conclusion.
Let's assume a 40-hour work week. (lol, I know)
Daily standups should be <= 15 minutes. Let's also suppose we're doing biweekly 30 minute 1:1s.
That's 1.25 hours per week, combined. Of course the real productivity loss of a meeting can be greater if it pulls you out of a "flow" state. Let's assume some of these rituals also incur a "flow state interruption" penalty of 30 additional minutes of lost productivity. So the total productivity cost is 2-3 hours per week per team member, or roughly 6% of their theoretical productive time.
I think this is a reasonable overhead. Working on a team requires communication. This seems like an efficient way to do it.
What's the alternative? Communicate whenever you feel like it? That's extremely iffy to put it mildly even if everybody on the team is an amazing communicator, which is an extremely unlikely ideal state of affairs. Adding a little structure makes sure the communication actually happens.
Let's assume a 40-hour work week. (lol, I know)
Daily standups should be <= 15 minutes. Let's also suppose we're doing biweekly 30 minute 1:1s.
That's 1.25 hours per week, combined. Of course the real productivity loss of a meeting can be greater if it pulls you out of a "flow" state. Let's assume some of these rituals also incur a "flow state interruption" penalty of 30 additional minutes of lost productivity. So the total productivity cost is 2-3 hours per week per team member, or roughly 6% of their theoretical productive time.
I think this is a reasonable overhead. Working on a team requires communication. This seems like an efficient way to do it.
What's the alternative? Communicate whenever you feel like it? That's extremely iffy to put it mildly even if everybody on the team is an amazing communicator, which is an extremely unlikely ideal state of affairs. Adding a little structure makes sure the communication actually happens.