In Defense of Meetings
It's often said that it takes an engineer about 15 minutes to regain focus after a meeting. The exact amount differs wildly by engineer and the type of work being done, but concept of needing time to regain focus is an important one to account for when managing an engineering organization. Scheduling a meeting every other hour for an engineer could cut their productivity by half (or more) with the remaining time left in the day (e.g. in 4 hours of meetings and 4 hours of dedicated coding time, they may only be productive for 2 hours). This loss of focus is so impactful that it is the only reason needed for engineers to be justified in their distaste for meetings.
You know what's worse than a meeting though? Taking a conversation that could have been a 30 minute meeting and extending it to an 8 hour conversation on Slack with messages coming every 5 minutes.
The first time I experienced that was like glass shattering. I had this distaste of chat slowly forming for months prior, but I couldn't explain why I was souring on chat. This extreme experience made me realized how often chat kills productivity rather than enable it.
I'm not saying chat is always bad and we should just go back to having everything be a meeting. I do think it is useful to analyze the aspects of both and then determine when each has its best utility. This analysis comes in three parts:
While chat has some very impactful differences from email, it also shares some of the core problems
The core problems with meetings (some of which are preventable)
The line between a conversation being better off as a meeting versus a chat
Chat has some important differences from email. The format feels more casual, which creates comfort. The content is more focused since messages come exclusively from people you work with or know. These two aspects create a more pleasant experience for most people than using email. However, they share one core problem: the disconnect from being in an actual conversation.Â
When you are talking to someone in real time (in person or voice chat), words mostly flow. Someone says something. Someone else responds. A response is then made to that response and so one. The responses come naturally. While responding, you can get a sense of the other person's facial expressions and body language. This allows you to understand how your response is being received as you are giving it and allows you to adapt if necessary. Humans have been communicating this way for as long as spoken language has existed.Â
Pseudo real-time/asynchronous text chat has only been around for a few decades. Before that, written communication came in the form of letters (aka emails, but printed on actual paper). A letter is not a natural form of communication. You have to get out all your thoughts at once. You won't get a sense of how other people will respond until your entire message is written and sent. This results in an attempt to understand how people may respond, followed by revision after revision of what we are writing until we think we will get the response we want. There is a great deal of stress involved in dealing with the unknown of other people's reactions to our words. It is why email feels so formal. If you say something out loud that you realize is coming out wrong, you can just say "sorry, I take that back. I'm trying to understand how to put what I'm thinking into words." You can't take back an email.
Text chat may feel more casual and pleasant than email, but it shares that same core problem. Think about how many times you see Slack say someone is typing, only for it to stop saying that they're typing, only for them to start typing again after a few seconds. That is us overthinking our chat messages like we overthink our emails. The chat messages may be shorter, but the activity is the same. The consequence of this activity is that chat messages take longer to produce than a spoken response.Â
This results in one of two scenarios. The first is that we expect a response to take a while (e.g. a few minutes) even if we know the person is actively responding, so we go attempt to do something else while waiting for a response. That something else can't be focused work though, so we find some busy work. That busy work ends up taking longer than it took the other person to respond, so we just added to the response time by having everyone wait for us to finish our busy work. The other people will also be doing busy work and so the overall conversation is going to end up taking quite a while. The result is no focused work being done during this time.
The other scenario is we may just stare at the chat screen:Â
"Person X is typing..." Oh! What are they going to say? Oh, they stopped typing. Maybe I'll start typing a response. "Person X is typing..." Oh! They started typing again. Let me delete my response until I see what they say.
The conversation takes longer than needed in this scenario as well and no focused work gets done.
If all the above is true, how can we explain why so many meetings feel like a waste of time?Â
Meetings have some major problems as well. The first is overhead. Most meetings need to be scheduled and that means trying to find time for everyone. Then there's the 10 minutes before a meeting where you're not able to get focused on anything (I am probably a strange exception where I am the most productive 10 minutes before a meeting). Impromptu meetings can be called, but then not everyone may be available.
 Another problem is that meetings have a time block. If you schedule a 30 minute meeting, but the conversation ends up only taking 15 minutes, what do you do? Call it and have everyone go? Or does someone bring up something and the time gets filled? The latter is a more common occurence and so meetings end up taking more time than necessary. Meetings can also be unfocused if no one is keeping the discussion focused. That can result in all the time being taken up without a resolution to the reason the meeting was called in the first place.Â
The last problem I'll touch on is that meetings are only useful if called in good faith. There is a legitimate thing that needs to be discussed and everyone invited to the meeting is actually required for the discussion. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. There are numerous reasons why a meeting could be called in bad faith, too numerous for me to go into here. I will just say that this is less a problem with meetings themselves, which are just a tool, and more of a problem with the people involved.
So we've gone through the major issues of chat and the major issues of meetings. What do we do? When is it right to use one versus the other?
The main issue with chat only comes up with longer discussions. With a short question and a short answer, chat has no problems and therefore is the ideal tool to use. Sometimes what we anticipate is a short question ends up not being so. Every major chat app seems to have a video call button now. That button is perfect when a chat discussion starts to become bigger. Those impromptu meetings also end up being the most productive since they have no time block. If they take 7 minutes, the meeting lasts 7 minutes. No need to extend it to 15 or 30 minutes. There's also little overhead in scheduling those meetings.
Regularly scheduled meetings also have a lot of utility even if the agenda is a little floaty. Humans have communicated with spoken words far longer than written ones. It plays a large part in building trust, which improves teamwork.Â
Planned one off meetings are going to suffer the issue of overhead in scheduling. There's no avoiding it. The other issues, such as using up a time block or getting distracted, can all be managed so long as someone in that meeting (hopefully the person who called it) ensures that the meeting stays on track and ends the meeting as soon as it can be ended.
Meetings are like any other tool. They're not to be avoided at all costs nor are they to be called whenever anything comes up. They should be used when appropriate. Maybe we can stop dreading/hating meetings if we started adherring to that idea.