Meeting Mayhem! #WFH

Attaining the balance between meetings and work

For many “Work from home” is turning out to be problematic as it leads to too many online meetings. The article describes how to solve this problem using Disk Defragmentation.

‘Work from home’ has helped big and small enterprises sustain in the challenging times in our struggle against COVID-19. We now work in a safe home environment. As we got used to working from home, many of us are working more hours than they did in the office. For some of us, more than half of our time is spent in online meetings. Especially for IT employees.

Continue reading if you are:

• Struggling to find enough uninterrupted time to work
• Suffering from too many meeting syndromes
• Finding it difficult to achieve deadlines

Now, there are many reasons for these problems. Meetings, Connectivity, Noise, People knocking on the door, interrupted power supply, and many more.

Let’s look at the most common problem that many IT employees are facing — ‘too many meetings’. And find how Disk Defragmentation can solve the problem!

First of all, Do you think having too many meetings or calls, impacts your productivity?

George A. Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, researched the ‘magical number seven‘. He explains how the human brain is capable of handling only limited information in our short-term memory.

"Have you ever been in a situation, where you were working on something and your friend/colleague interrupts you, and after you return to the work, you completely forget about what you were doing, Or are unable to return to where you were?"

This is because the human brain, unlike computers doesn’t work like the Round Robin Algorithm. We simply overwrite the information from our short-term memory.

Now, to communicate while working from home we usually communicate via the official communication channel i.e, Skype, Teams, Slack, etc.

It’s very easy to ping someone and get on a call with them.

Now for the recipient, it’s an interruption. Even if it is a simple ‘hi’. This requires a context switch. It’s widely accepted that context switching is bad for productivity.

Now, an obvious solution we might choose is to schedule a call (meeting) instead of interrupting the colleague. It’s a good alternative, but there is one BIG! problem.

How does this calendar day (on right) look? Not so bad right? I am sure most of us have a more occupied calendar than this one. There is a lot of time to work between the meetings to get work done, Right?

Well, Let’s consider you are working on a solution, which usually requires some research, trial & error, or just some time to focus. The even simpler scenario would be when you already know the solution, but you need time to implement it. Matter of fact, any work that requires some Me-time.

These meetings will force you to abandon your work in the middle.

It is a good example of context switching. In a study conducted by the University of California Irvine, It was found that — it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.

So, how do we solve the problem?

The Answer:- We use the concept of Disk Defragmentation! Technically is the process of bringing similar data together and combining the free memory blocks

In our case, we defragment our calendars!

The idea is to divide our workday into two parts.

1. Do Not Disturb (DND) Zone:

It's the time to focus, work without interruption, complete the tasks.

2. Collaboration Zone:

We use this time to collaborate with the team. Attend planned OR unplanned meetings, help Or get help from others, participate in scrum ceremonies, and importantly - We plan the next day!

For this to work, we need to work with our teams and come to an agreement. We need to define a clear DND and meeting zones.

The time for each zone might differ depending on the team’s preference.

As an example, A 9 hours workday can be divided into 4 hours DND and 4 hours Meeting zone.

As a thumb rule of Agile, try different time intervals and adapt as per the team’s needs.

The preferred time for DND Zone would be in the morning, as we start fresh and can get more work done. Please note, there might be situations where immediate action is required, and waiting for DND might not be an option. In this scenario, we recommend making this request through the lead or manager. As they can delegate the task more efficiently.

Please follow the classroom rule to join any meeting:

You should join a classroom if you are either teaching Or learning.

In the context of meetings, it means to join a meeting to share or learn something.

There are other types of distractions, that are not related to the office, like our mobile phones. But, I will keep it for another article. 🙂