Am I the only one that hates meetings and interruptions??

I agree meetings are a good way to keep the communication flow between teams, and that the lack of communication is what kills most of the IT projects, and that meetings are an effective way to mitigate that risk.

I agree sometime you need to interrupt your colleague's work to ask something and complete your task.

BUT...........

Having several meetings every single day is also a killer! You get to do nothing in your project, generally meetings conclude with tasks assigned to people (like "review this document", "complete this form", "send this email to the team", "make sure you change this in your code", etc), and most of the time there is no good place to report that time in your timesheet (what will you say to your client, I spent 25%+ of the time in meetings, not coding? sounds unproductive and inefficient!).

That's something I like from Scrum: stand up meetings: don't put any chair in the room so everyone stands up, which forces everyone to make the meeting quick. You only talk about the important things and everyone is back at work in minutes.

I think people who hate them most are programmers. If you have a meeting in the middle of the morning you have to stop whatever you're doing and attend. By the time you come back (no matter how short the meeting was), you don't recall exactly what you were doing, you lost "your moment" and you need to put at least 5 min reviewing your design or code and focusing again.

Same happens with interruptions. I hate when people say "one quick question, won't take too much of your time". Well, your question might take me 2 minutes to answer, but your interruption will cost me additional 5-10 minutes (which of course you won't perceive because you'll be back in your desk) which I can't report in my current project (what can I put: "spent an hour this week trying to focus again after answering questions"?).

I love emails. They give you the chance to check them whenever you have time or a break. They are a permanent repository so you if someone asks you the same question again (which happens a lot), you can go back and re-send the email.

Don't get me wrong. I agree communications is critical in IT, and I love helping people solve their problems. It's just that I feel frustrated at the end of the day when I realize I did less of what I planned and that I spent a lot of time trying to re-focus.



//Update at 12:10
I'm not the only one!!!!!!

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/read-this-if-you-hate-meetings/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster104.html
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/why_i_hate_meetings/
http://www.the-arm.com/2010/03/i-hate-meetings-they-make-me-sick/
http://ezinearticles.com/?I-Hate-Meetings---10-Tips-For-Better-Meetings&id=1909313