066: Make Meetings Suck Less

16 March, 2022

Transcript

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[00:00:00] Ben: Yeah. Have you ever accidentally told someone you'd love them in a

[00:00:02] Ben: goodbye.

[00:00:04] Adam: Oh,

[00:00:06] Ben: All right. Talk to you later. Love you,

[00:00:09] Carol: Oh I just say that out

[00:00:10] Carol: of habit all the time.

[00:00:11] Tim: I've never done that, but someone. So I was talking to, she was like the secretary at work and she's like, all right. All right. Talk to you later. Bye. Love you. I'm like love you too. I'm like, she's like,

[00:00:42] Intro

[00:00:42] Adam: Okay. Here we go. It is show number 66 and on today's show Carol's back. Hi, Carol.

[00:00:48] Carol: Hey,

[00:00:50] Tim: who's back.

[00:00:52] Carol: again,

[00:00:53] Tim: Carol's back.

[00:00:54] Carol: the telephone, tell a friend, I was going to say with a friend, but there's nobody here. I'm alone.

[00:01:02] Tim: Oh.

[00:01:04] Adam: And on today's show, we're going to talk about making meetings suck less. but as usual, we're going to start with our triumphs and fails and Carol we'll come back. you can go for.

[00:01:14] Carol's Triumph

[00:01:14] Carol: Yay. I'm going to go with the triumphs. So I miss last week because I had the pageant, we were in rehearsals and planning and there was just no way to accomplish everything. So something had to give and I'm sorry, you guys. you were the thing that I gave up. So, but it was for a good cause. we ended up raising almost $4,000 or actually over $4,000.

[00:01:35] Carol: We raised over $4,000, for instruments for the band program at the school. And we gave away almost $2,000 in scholarships to young

[00:01:42] Adam: Nice.

[00:01:43] Carol: So yeah. really went well. we were struggling for volunteers up front and somehow just everything just fell into place. Things just were delivered. They were where they were supposed to be.

[00:01:53] Carol: Everything went smoothly. My kid walked along the catwalk and, you know, helped with lights and Steve helped with lights and people just did things and it was grand. I loved it.

[00:02:04] Ben: Very cool.

[00:02:05] Carol: when's that you Ben.

[00:02:07] Ben's Fail

[00:02:07] Ben: I'm going to go with a failure and a, I don't want to throw Scott Stroh's under the bus here, but, all his talk about angular made me start to feel very nostalgic last week. And then I was listening to podcasts and they're talking about some sort of state of the JavaScript survey. And I was in some architecture office hour meetings, and I watched a presentation at work about react hooks.

[00:02:28] Ben: I'm a little bit overcome this week with feelings of FOMO, the fear of missing out. And, I, every now and then I just fall into this pit where I become highly aware of how many other things there are out there. And I start to feel like I'm slipping. And, even in the technologies that I know and love, I feel like I'm slipping because they're not necessarily something that I've put into practice all the time.

[00:02:52] Ben: And I'm no, I don't love being in that mindset, but I also don't love missing out on stuff either. So it's very challenging.

[00:03:02] Carol: So do you find when you work with something all the time, you get that feeling of like, like you said, the FOMO, because. You have, there's not a lot to learn from it anymore. You know what you're doing with it? And you kind of reuse what you already know. So the challenge to learn something new, isn't always there.

[00:03:21] Ben: I think it depends on the work. So I, as everyone here knows, I work in ColdFusion and I absolutely love ColdFusion. and some weeks it feels really super exciting and you know, that usually happens when I'm working on something that I feel is an interesting part of the product. And as may, probably user-facing it as solving a problem for them.

[00:03:42] Ben: but this week I've been doing just a lot of internal stuff and that's still exciting. And I know I have quote unquote customers, right. But it's just my own team and I'm building some stuff for them, but a little bit feels like doing stuff internally is a zero sum game with doing stuff for customers.

[00:03:59] Ben: Cause, cause there's that opportunity costs as I'm building internal tooling for our team, I'm definitely not building cool and exciting features for the users. And that's, I think emotionally very challenging for me at this point, just because of I've worked closely with the users and it's so exciting and you've, and you see how easy it is sometimes to solve the problem.

[00:04:19] Ben: I mean, a lot of times it's really hard to solve their problems, but there's that dopamine and that excitement of building something for somebody I think removes the feelings of missing out on other stuff. Cause you're filling that space with happy feelings about your users and about your product.

[00:04:36] Ben: But when work feels tedious, that's when I start to feel like, oh man, there's so much stuff out there that I'm not doing.

[00:04:42] Carol: Oh,

[00:04:43]

[00:04:44] Adam: you were talking about the dopamine hit from, delivering a feature for users. I get that as well, but I think that I also have found a way to get the same thing from delivering functionality that makes developer life better too. Whether it's my own or somebody else's like making deploys faster or lower friction or anything like that, it's just anything that I know is going to be a quality of life improvement for anybody.

[00:05:09] Adam: that's my job.

[00:05:11] Ben: I agree. I think I'm in a special circumstance in that the product that I work on has a limited lifetime. it's not like there's forever for me to loop back and build some stuff for customers like I have now, and now it doesn't last for that long. And so when I take my eyes off the. it feels like that's time. I'd, I'm not going to make back that was like a whole mixture of weird metaphors together.

[00:05:37] Carol: But I think we followed.

[00:05:40] Adam: So, wait, are you saying maybe just kind of clicked for me. So you're saying that because of that reason where you feel like you can't unfocus from client work and that's why you're falling behind, or you feel like you're falling behind and that's where the FOMO.

[00:05:56] Ben: It's more like when the negative feeling set in the negativity likes company. And so when I'm feeling not negative about work, but when I'm feeling stressed about work or when I'm feeling FOMO within the work's fear that FOMO quickly expands to be everything outside as well.

[00:06:18] Tim: So what's your action plan.

[00:06:19] Tim: talk about learning, state of Java script and things like that. What's your action plan to unfollow.

[00:06:24] Ben: I have this 2022 goal of trying to build something that is deployed via containers,

[00:06:31] Tim: Hm.

[00:06:32] Ben: doing that I think will go a long way towards making me feel like I'm staying abreast of the cool stuff. but it's,I have not made any progress there. I just need to pick something.

[00:06:44] Tim: And how about testing?

[00:06:49] Tim: We'll get you one day, Ben.

[00:06:50] Adam: w we need a horse sound effect for

[00:06:52] Adam: beating the dead

[00:06:53] Carol: time

[00:06:54] Ben: it was funny. It was like, if I can tangent for two seconds,

[00:06:57] Tim: Sure.

[00:06:57] Adam: this is the Bendel tangent show. So

[00:07:02] Ben: I was thinking about the movie 300. I assume everyone here has seen 300,

[00:07:07] Carol: I have

[00:07:07] Ben: maybe not Carol. it's early Gerard Butler and I don't know if it's early Gerard, but it's drive by there from like 15 years.

[00:07:15] Adam: kind of like popularized his career.

[00:07:17] Ben: Yeah. and there's the scene at the end where, I mean, spoiler alerts,

[00:07:21] Carol: I'm covering my ears.

[00:07:22] Tim: It's 15 years, if you haven't seen it by now.

[00:07:25] Ben: that 300 Spartans are basically at the end of what they can do and kingly and I, this is Gerard Butler. I think it's Leonidas. he has to bow before the, I think that the Persians are the invading army, so he has to bow.

[00:07:39] Ben: So he takes his helmet off and he drops a shield And he, then he gets down on his knees and then he, some fighting starts with Sue and then he pops back up and the narrator comes on and says, like he had to remove his helmet because his helmet narrowed his vision and he needed to be able to see his enemy.

[00:07:55] Ben: And he had to drop a shield because the shield was heavy and it threw him off balance and he needed to be able to throw his spear very far. And,not to be overly dramatic, but like a little bit sometimes that's how I, sometimes that's how I think about, like testing and linting and stuff that like, there are these tools that are there to protect us, but sometimes like you have to drop that armor and you have to take off your helmet, you have to drop your shield in order to be able to be agile and to move quickly and to attack your enemies.

[00:08:23] Carol: And you die quickly.

[00:08:25] Tim: Yeah. Yeah. So who won that battle? The Persians or the Spartans at Thermopylae?

[00:08:31] Ben: missing the point.

[00:08:32] Tim: No, no,no. You're missing the point.

[00:08:35] Adam: and Ben is your helmet and shield ever on or?

[00:08:40] Ben: I know where it is.

[00:08:43] Tim: I think we roasted him enough

[00:08:45] Adam: Okay.

[00:08:46] Ben:

[00:08:46] Adam's Triumph

[00:08:46] Adam: so my triumph this week is I didn't get fired

[00:08:48] Tim: Yay.

[00:08:49] Adam: or was it, I guess it was two weeks ago was my, 10 year anniversary of.

[00:08:53] Carol: Yeah.

[00:08:54] Adam: we recorded that. and, this is the week that episode aired, and this is the week that actually had my 10 year anniversary. And we were just joking like, at the time,it would be my 10 years if I didn't get fired first and

[00:09:05] Carol: That's when we talks about when's a good time to leave, right.

[00:09:08] Carol: I'm pretty sure exactly what we say. When's a good time to leave now.

[00:09:12] Adam: So yeah, no, that's it it's been a quiet week. Some things are being worked on projects are hitting production, but you know, no really big highs, no really big lows. So

[00:09:22] Carol: Well, that's.

[00:09:22] Ben: Very cool.

[00:09:23] Ben: Staying the

[00:09:23] Ben: course.

[00:09:24] Adam: the status is quo, so that's it for me. Tim.

[00:09:30] Tim's Triumph

[00:09:30] Tim: so try it for me as well. past couple weeks I launched kind of did a product launch in the dark, kind of under the cover. don't even know, kind of hesitate, even saves a product launch. So it's kind of an ancillary thing that I did. So we have this system that, handles phone calls and, takes phone calls and it's, IVR responses and things like that.

[00:09:48] Tim: But, also since text messages. So, part of it was to be able to send out, reminders and text messages to tell people that, they have a payment coming up or they're about, their policies about to be canceled. And, I can charge four per send and just like really wasn't a whole lot of work.

[00:10:06] Tim: And it's like, someone's like, Hey, can you do this? I'm like, okay. Launch that now. I have like six, seven other clients lined up to take it. So it's like just bringing in extra money for really not a whole lot of extra work. So

[00:10:20] Tim: Yeah,

[00:10:20] Tim: I call that a win.

[00:10:21] Ben: definitely.

[00:10:22] Adam: Congrats man.

[00:10:24] Tim: The only thing is I can just keeping up with the law.

[00:10:27] Tim: So they, there's some laws that came out last year, late last year, about how dealing with text messages and in like trying to reduce spam text messages. So there's some challenges there, but, yeah. handling those. So it's going pretty good. So it's pretty cool when you can like bring in extra revenue in and everybody's like, go cool.

[00:10:46] Adam: Yeah.

[00:10:47] Tim: Didn't expect that. And it wasn't a whole lot of work, so

[00:10:50] Carol: at, and T likes a block us on the regular for sending out too many text messages because our vendors will get notified when properties are available to be picked up. So some of them are set that they want texts, notification to go pick up the property. Otherwise they want the email. So the ones that are on texts we'll have an order come in from some banks, they'll have, 10,000 listings on it and we need to send 10,000 text messages out to multiple people.

[00:11:15] Carol: And yeah.

[00:11:16] Tim: you sending from an 800 number

[00:11:18] Carol: Oh, I don't know what they're doing

[00:11:19] Carol: and

[00:11:20] Tim: cause there was not because what I learned today is if it's not toll free,

[00:11:23] Tim: the networks will limit you to like six text messages per minute.

[00:11:27] Carol: Yeah. It's ridiculous. I do know that, so,

[00:11:30] Tim: so, but if it's an 800 number you're sending from it,it's unlimited.

[00:11:33] Carol: oh, we need to go

[00:11:34] Carol: look at that.

[00:11:35] Adam: how are you doing it? Cause I mean, we do some texting through Twilio and I think we send from a shortcut. I got one of those five or six digit numbers. and I don't think we're limited to six a minute.

[00:11:47] Ben: I think short codes are also.

[00:11:50] Tim: Yeah, but Yeah. it's kind of dark magic. How the SMS carriers kind of de what things LA, I mean, they don't really give you all the rules, so honestly,

[00:11:59] Tim: but

[00:12:00] Carol: And T is one of the only ones that will block us.

[00:12:02] Tim: Yeah.

[00:12:02] Tim: At and T is very strict. they've, they are very strict, but the other ones are now getting on board with it. So it's like, it's going to get harder and harder to send like, just text messages in the clear, in, unless you, and there's like registration is called the something 10 DLC or something.

[00:12:18] Tim: I probably got that completely wrong. I'm sure. But, you have to register your, like your campaign with, with the carriers, through whoever you're doing. So Twilio has like a form and so does all of them have a form? Basically you can fill out to say, here's what I'm sending. and here's what it kind of looks like.

[00:12:36] Tim: And here's the reason I'm sending it. Once the carriers get those, they will recognize your number and say, okay, you're sending what you said. You said. so yeah, so I've had to fill out a bunch of those forms recently as well. So yeah, the legislation on this is, yeah, you just got to keep up with it, but

[00:12:55] Ben: We use Twilio at work also. And in the last year or so, we've started to get notifications that certain countries, it seems to be mostly in Africa right now, where you have to go and like preregister numbers, like instead of just having Twilio's like, I don't quite understand because I have not been involved, but apparently you have to go through a bunch of extra special steps in order to send messages in those countries.

[00:13:19] Carol: Hm.

[00:13:20] Tim: don't have any customers in Africa, so I haven't run it against that, but yeah. So it was pretty cool to kind of launch something kind of in the dark that just brings an extra revenue. So when.

[00:13:28] Carol: Yay.

[00:13:30] Adam: Yeah, seriously.

[00:13:32] Carol: Quietly make money. Woo.

[00:13:35]

[00:13:35] Audible

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[00:13:50] Adam: No strings attached, and we get a little kickback from that. Thanks for supporting us by supporting our sponsors. Now back.

[00:13:57]

[00:13:57] How The Crew Feels About Meetings

[00:13:57] Tim: But I did have to have a lot of meetings yesterday. Yesterday was meeting hell for me. I mean, back to back to back me, it just, normally I don't have a lot of meetings, but you know, guys, sometimes meetings just suck.

[00:14:13] Carol: only sometimes.

[00:14:16] Adam: by definition, right?

[00:14:17] Carol: I think it's the Mudgee. Oh, they always suck. Okay. Yeah.

[00:14:20] Ben: Have you ever been on a screen share with someone and they flip over to their Google calendar and it's like a solid wall of colors, like back-to-back meetings all day, every day,

[00:14:31] Carol: colors.

[00:14:32] Tim: yeah, that was me yesterday.

[00:14:33] Ben: I can't even survive when you go to the.

[00:14:38] Carol: Or trying to get a meeting with that person. I'm like two weeks out going. You have no free time. What are you doing for dinner tonight? Cause I need to talk to you

[00:14:47] Tim: I mean, I'm lucky. I've fast, like Monday through Thursday. Cause it's like, I didn't have a lunch I'll, yesterday or Wednesday. So

[00:14:55] Tim: it's like, I just, I just meetings through lunch.

[00:14:58] Carol: They're terrible. And we have stand up and there's like 20 people on our team. So our 20 people that go through stand up with us and we just recently made a change to where we try to get through everything in under 30 minutes. So that's kind of hard to do with that many people like to actually go through any information.

[00:15:16] Carol: So we're like, we no longer want to hear that you went to training. We all are forced to go to training every week. Stop telling us you're going to training. We don't care. Everybody does it. We all know we have stand up and story time today. So let's not repeat that one again. Cause everyone does that as well too.

[00:15:31] Carol: So they're like, let's just go high and low. What do you got blocked on? What are you working on next person? We've gotten really good at it. We're down to like 17 minutes. It's, pretty impressive when we can get out. And under 20 minutes with that many people.

[00:15:45] Adam: I'm on a five person team and we probably don't do less than 17 minutes most days.

[00:15:52] Ben: real.

[00:15:54] Adam: to be fair, I mean, we don't do a real, like true agile stand up our, sort of the CEO, his, he works kind of detached from the rest of the team. So the morning meeting is like his opportunity to catch us up on what you know is important that happened for the whole company yesterday or this week.

[00:16:10] Adam: And so, it's usually, five to 10 minutes of him like catching us up on important stuff. And then, five minutes of around the horn for team people.

[00:16:20] Ben: Yeah, I'm on a team basically of me and then the other two guys who used to be on my team, humor me and they show up to the, our stand-ups still.

[00:16:29] Ben: So yeah, it's really nice actually. But the first 20 minutes of that meeting are basically, yeah, it's basically just us. We asking about work or talking about movies or whatever, and then like 10 minutes before it ends, I'll be like, so what's going on with you guys at work, but it's like my social gathering for the day really?

[00:16:52] Ben: Cause I don't have a ton of me. And I don't deal with a lot of people. So for me, it's like the it's in a fully remote company that first 20 minutes of the standup is like my water cooler

[00:17:05] Adam: Yeah. That's also true for us. I would say, unless there's like something bad going on that we have to like, get a bunch of people together in a video chat for incident response sort of thing.

[00:17:15] Tim: no.

[00:17:15] Adam: that, I'm unlikely to see anybody else or hear any other voices for the rest of the.

[00:17:20] Meeting Participation

[00:17:20] Tim: So I'm going to be just completely honest. I have a visceral hatred meetings. I just, I don't like them in general, particularly for just, and I do them because they're a necessary evil. And, we have like a monthly, like once every, like tomorrow is our first Friday, is our first front of the March.

[00:17:41] Tim: And we have a first, Friday kind of general kind of, it's a social kind of thing. Everyone in our group kind of get together and just kind of, Hey, what you got going on is kind of a very relaxed, no set agenda, but didn't understand why I hated most meetings because I've been to so many meetings where there are like 20, 30 people on.

[00:18:01] Tim: And I don't say a word, the entire meeting. Right. And I'm not learning anything in the. entire. AndI'm not an Elon Musk fan. Boy, I do. I respect him, but you know, I didn't fully understand why I hated them so bad until he, so he was interviewed

[00:18:18] Tim: about,

[00:18:19] Adam: it almost sounded like you were saying you hated Elon Musk. You were

[00:18:22] Tim: no, I don't hate him. no, I don't why I hated meetings.

[00:18:25] Tim: Thank you for the correction. so he was in an interview and they asked about the culture at Tesla when it comes to meetings. And he said that the culture is that if you're in a meeting where you are not contributing anything and you're not learning anything from that meeting, you're not getting anything from it.

[00:18:40] Tim: You should drop off the meeting. Don't say anything, just leave. I'm like, that makes sense. Right. I've been on so many of those meetings where I am not contributing. I'm not learning anything from this. Why do I need to be here most of the time? And I think about my actions when I'm on that call, like I'm on a call and I realize, you know what?

[00:18:57] Tim: I doesn't really nothing. I can contribute to this call. I immediately start pulling up code or spreadsheets or something to start working on something. And I'm not paying attention at all, but I'm not fully focused on what I should be doing. And so his point was it's, the interviewer said, isn't that disrespectful to leave the meeting?

[00:19:15] Tim: He goes, no, it's disrespectful to stay

[00:19:18] Adam: Yeah. It was like disrespectful to the country.

[00:19:20] Tim: yeah, just Yeah, Disrespect to yourself and to the company, because you're not contributing the best you can. And so I totally buy into that now. So it's like, when we have calls, I preface it with, particularly if it's one I've organized, right.

[00:19:33] Tim: I've called a meeting. I'm like, listen, we have a lot of people on this. Here's what we're going to talk about the agenda. I think that's another important thing to have an agenda about what you're trying to achieve on this call. if you've looked at the agenda and you feel you can contribute, I encourage you to stay.

[00:19:49] Tim: If you are, if you look at the agenda and you really don't think you have anything to contribute, please feel free to drop off at any time

[00:19:55] Adam: Yeah, it makes me think of like, when you go to a conference and your, you pick a topic, but then you're, 10 minutes into it. You're like, this is not what I expected and I'm not going to get anything out of this. There's no value. So I should just get up and leave and go find a different.

[00:20:08] Tim: yeah.

[00:20:09] Carol: that's.

[00:20:09] Adam: It is. I mean, but you know, having been the person on the stage, I would rather everybody in the audience be glued to me. Right. It's better to see how half empty audience and everybody's like, staring at me intently. Cause they're like, yes, this is awesome. Then to see a whole audience, but everybody's on their laptops and

[00:20:26] Tim: Um,

[00:20:26] Carol: Okay. That is true. Cause see, I was thinking more of, instead of leaving the meeting, I tend to just go do something else, but turn my camera off and just kind of listen to it, to hear key words. So I kind of know what's going on with everything. So I have the information there if I need it, but I'm not gonna put anything to it.

[00:20:46] Carol: I'm not going to use it probably, but should something come up down the road? I heard it and can go, oh, knows about this. Or so-and-so was working on that. I kind of know where to direct people.

[00:20:57] Ben: The worst part is when you're in that sort of half listening state, and then someone's like, I don't know, maybe Carol, can you speak to that?

[00:21:04] Carol: Um, sorry, the dog was shooting up my shoe. Can you repeat that?

[00:21:10] Tim: Yeah, that,

[00:21:10] Tim: that?

[00:21:10] Tim: was, I was in a marketing mean today, which I re you know, I really didn't care about the marketing meeting at all.

[00:21:17] Tim: And so like, I was totally working on something else and like someone all in, unfortunately. So one of my, one of my salespeople, his name is Tim as well. And so they started talking about asking Tim questions and I'm like, oh, and there must be the other guy.

[00:21:31] Tim: And they're like, Hey, Tim is your CA is your, are you muted? And I'm like, oh, they're talking to me.

[00:21:37] Tim: Oh, I have not, I have not heard a thing they're talking about.

[00:21:41] Asynchronous vs Synchronous

[00:21:41] Ben: that's hilarious. I'll tell you, talking about. For people who are on the call when I was younger, I used to think, I used to love the idea of asynchronous communication, writing down all my thoughts in a document, and then sending it to someone and then allowing them to read that and their time.

[00:22:00] Ben: and as I've gotten older, and I think this is maybe an unpopular opinion, I have found asynchronous communication to be more disrespectful than pulling people into meetings only because asynchronous communication feels like it's never going to end someone throws out a document and then people comment on it and then more people comment on it and then it gets edited and then it gets sent back around again.

[00:22:23] Ben: And it's like, it's you get sucked into this Bermuda triangle of effort.

[00:22:28] Adam: I feel like async works. Okay. When it's one, like just two people back and forth, but yeah, especially with more than one with more than two people, there's always this fear. Like I'm going to miss something that somebody else said after I read the document or like that.

[00:22:43] Ben: Yo even you'll be reading a document. I guess every, all the documentaries are different, but you'd be reading it. It didn't say like confluence and it'll tell you at the bottom, oh, someone's new comment. Someone left a comment and you're like, do I continue to read the document and then do the comments?

[00:22:56] Ben: Or should I jump into their comment immediately? Is it going to be relevant? It's very, I don't enjoy asynchronous as a group at all.

[00:23:02] Tim: Yeah, I'll tell you. So I'll give you an example. As much as I said, I hate meetings. This is an example where I actually loved them. So yesterday we had a meeting, so a couple of weeks ago a customer basically asked us for a request and I didn't fully understand what he meant. And I realized that I just knowing the customer and just kind of, kind of the nebulous nature of the request.

[00:23:25] Tim: I realized that if we did an email back and forth, it would have been like 15 emails and probably no resolution.

[00:23:33] Adam: And to do that, it's going to take two days because you send an email and then they don't see it for an hour and a half, and then they reply.

[00:23:40] Tim: Yep. So I just said, let's set up a meeting, we'll talk about this and he couldn't meet until. Yesterday. So we met yesterday and so we had the meeting and it was just me, him, and one of the, so it was a small group and I'm like, all right, explain to me the problem.

[00:23:55] Tim: W what are you trying to solve here? And he explained it, and it's like, had an issue where they're taking credit card numbers in advance, and then charging them later. But sometimes when they're talking to a customer, they don't know which card is being charged. Right. So they, they were like asking us to build this set of reports that we didn't really have for them.

[00:24:14] Tim: And so in the discussion, as we talked, I mean, less than 30 minutes, he came to the realization. I'm like, well, in our API APIs, you can actually do a request. You have the account token, you have this token, you can do a request on that token. See what the information is, and you can see what the card number is.

[00:24:31] Tim: He's like, oh Yeah.

[00:24:32] Tim: So when he came to that conclusion is like, okay, you don't need to build anything. We can do this ourselves. Right. we can build in the actual would be better because you're not having to, he wanted us to build something where they would have to log in to some portal and do the he's like we can actually do this ourselves and that they don't have to jump to another system.

[00:24:48] Tim: And so the meeting resulted in, I don't have to do anything, which I much prefer. And so, and he said, I'm sorry, I wasted your time. And I said, no, you didn't waste our time. You didn't waste this meeting. I said, if we hadn't had this meeting, I would have just assumed, you were correct.

[00:25:06] Tim: And I need to build something and I would have built something. It wouldn't have been what you wanted. It wouldn't want what done, what you needed it to do. And it would have been extra work for all your users. So the fact that you realize you can do this yourself is the most positive outcome from this meeting.

[00:25:20] Tim: So that's the meeting that I like these mating meetings where you're just some sort of status meeting or just a update meeting where. you're going through a laundry list of stuff. Just kills my soul.

[00:25:33] Agendas

[00:25:33] Adam: So you had mentioned, having an agenda as an important thing for a meeting. And I totally agree. Cause it, like you were saying, it makes it really easy to see upfront. Is this going to be applicable to me? Is there anything I can learn from this? Even if I can't contribute sort of thing. and along the line of agendas, there's something that my team picked up from, I guess, some sort of Amazon manifesto or whatever about the way they do meetings at Amazon, like amazon.com.

[00:25:56] Adam: and that is every meeting has to have an agenda and there's time set aside at the beginning of every meeting for everybody to just sit in silence and read the agenda. And then once everybody's read it, then you can have the meeting. and I really liked that because it, what it means is that nobody has to prepare in advance for any of the meetings, as long as, your subject matter.

[00:26:14] Adam: Like if you're a subject matter expert, then you're expected to be an expert. But other than that, no preparation is needed.

[00:26:20] Adam: That makes a lot of

[00:26:20] Adam: sense.

[00:26:21] Carol: I

[00:26:21] Carol: like that workflow.

[00:26:22] Adam: Yeah. The one thing about it that I don't like that I've found in my own small team is that I feel a pressure to not be the last one reading. Right. We have a system we've tried a couple of different things over the over time, but where we've kind of landed is like everybody mutes while you're reading.

[00:26:41] Adam: And then when you're done reading you unmute and we can see the little microphone, we see the little microphone icon on your video. So, we can tell who's still reading and man, when everybody else has done reading and you're only like halfway through the document, that's like, do I keep reading or do I just pretend?

[00:26:56] Carol: AndNo, that's when you call them all cheaters and assume that they read it before the meeting.

[00:27:01] Tim: I tell you. So I've like tried to read, like over my wife's shoulder left page. And she's such a fast reader compared to me, I thought it was a fast reader and then I'm like, I'm halfway through and she's like done. I'm like, oh my God, how to read all that? So fast.

[00:27:18] Ben: I'm so slow. I narrate as I'm reading it, it's almost like I'm reading a, like Winnie the Pooh book where I'm like, he hit the deployment, said piglet, and then he let his team know that said Digger I'm at work. So I'm in a bi-weekly meeting and operational readiness meeting. And we do, the same sort of thing, where we all turn our cameras off and says, so we don't meet, we turn our cameras, our zoom cameras off.

[00:27:44] Ben: everybody reads the document. Everybody turns their cameras on as they're done. but to alleviate, I think some of that am I last anxiety, the guy who runs the meeting, he just picks a time. So we'll come in and say, let's say we start at 11 o'clock. He'll say, all right, everybody take until 1115 to read through the doctor.

[00:28:02] Ben: And then if everybody does their video, before that he'll ask, does anybody need more time to read? otherwise he'll just sit there and he'll wait until 1115, which so, if you're done already, it feels a little strange. but I know it's kind of nice that there's no time pressure.

[00:28:16] Ben: Like this is we've set aside this much time. It's not a race,

[00:28:20] Adam: But then what if you're still not done at 15 minutes?

[00:28:27] Ben: but I do. I really like that. I have always hated the idea of having to read documents before a meeting. It's like a, it's like some reading when you're in school. Yeah. don't give me a chore.

[00:28:38] Tim: yeah,

[00:28:39] Ben: already coming to your meeting.

[00:28:40] Tim: Putting it in the meeting invite is really helpful. So cause it's like, particularly like sometimes you're like, we need to talk about this, but because of schedules is like not until next week, right. Lateness next week today's Monday. And he can't do it till Friday of next week. And it's like, by that time, dude, I have no clue what we were talking about originally.

[00:28:58] Tim: So having that in the meeting invite is super helpful.

[00:29:01] Adam: Yeah. So, I mean, we've talked a lot about things that like trying to give people an out and to, to minimizing the number of people that are there and the minimizing the time, I guess another thing that I'm constantly aware of, especially since I work at such a small company, my whole company is five people. So that means if we have all five of us on like our morning meeting every day for 12 minutes, that's an hour of time for the company like that.

[00:29:25] Adam: And that's yeah, that's a lot. so,

[00:29:27] Tim: like 500 an hour,

[00:29:29] Adam: well, yeah, I don't know. we don't operate that way, but still

[00:29:32] Adam: like,

[00:29:32] Ben: people's time.

[00:29:33] Adam: yeah. I mean, I guess that math is true no matter who, no matter how big your company is, but if you, instead of saying that's an hour of time,I guess another way of looking at it is like, that's a certain percentage of our day, right?

[00:29:45] Adam: So we have five people, times, eight hours. That's what, 40 hours in a day. so that's, one 40th of our day gone. There's that

[00:29:54] Adam: one? Yeah. Math is hard. Sorry. When you're on a microphone, math is hard. Let's just leave it at that.

[00:30:00] Carol: Math is hard when you're not on the microphone.

[00:30:02] Scheduling

[00:30:02] Tim: I also pointed out, so it's like, I don't know if maybe you guys can, if it's just me, but so if I have a meeting at, one o'clock right, and then I have like a 30 minute gap. And another meeting at two o'clock that 30 minutes. And it's like, I'm really not motivated to do a whole lot else.

[00:30:23] Tim: Right.

[00:30:23] Tim: Because

[00:30:24] Adam: YouTube videos.

[00:30:25] Tim: I,

[00:30:25] Tim: know I can't get stuck in. Right. So it's like, cause, cause you're, when you're having to shift between coding and meetings, it's two totally different mindsets. Right. And so it's like, how much can I get done in 30 minutes of coding, maybe I'll look at something. Or typically I'll just kind of look at an email and try to respond to something that, that's a quick fix or something.

[00:30:46] Tim: But I feel that, but then again, I don't like having meetings back to back because it's like, it feels unrelenting and I need some time to decompress.

[00:30:57] Carol: I need to breathe between them. I like to take that 30 minutes to go pull up. What I think I might work on after my meetings are done and just kind of go ahead and prep like prepare for what I have coming up. So then I'm like, ah, I have some code to look forward to. Yes. I have something happy that comes after this meeting.

[00:31:15] Carol: There's a problem I'm going to solve.

[00:31:18] Tim: Yep. And that's kind of why I will like block out like two to three hour portions of my day throughout the week that they're, they look like because when people are trying to schedule, they can like, we use teams and so on, on Microsoft teams, they can, people can see where you have meetings and they'll try not to schedule on it.

[00:31:37] Tim: I'll just block those out so that they're not. So I have like a contiguous amount of time where I can actually do some coding work. Otherwise people are just going to pop on my calendar. I didn't do that, for my, my, my yesterday. And that's why I wound up back to back to back meetings all throughout the day, even through lunch.

[00:31:56] Adam: Well, I think that's a double-edged sword, right? So if you don't, allow yourself something close to back to back meetings, then you end up with, two or three meetings every day for the week. Whereas the other side of that coin, the other extreme is all of your meetings in one day or all of your meetings in two days.

[00:32:11] Adam: And the rest of the week is uninterrupted, coding time or whatever. And, I think if I were in your shoes, I would probably try to do like, 15 minutes or half hour between each meeting, but all my meetings as close together as.

[00:32:25] Ben: I get frustrated because I feel like my brain is supercharged in the morning. The morning hours are definitely my most creative. So if I could choose when I was going to have meetings, I would code all morning and then close out the day. With meetings because I'm sort of like mentally dragging already.

[00:32:45] Ben: The meeting's probably actually a nice refresher. I get to talk to people, get to plan for the next day. but the irony is that in my company, I almost always have meetings in the morning when I should be really focusing on squeezing as much juice out of my brain meat. people seem to love to front load those meetings,

[00:33:01] Carol: do you brain meet? That is the best analogy ever.

[00:33:08] Ben: but yeah, people love to front load those meetings

[00:33:11] Carol: Well, I get lucky cause I work on the west coast. So our nine 30 stand-up is 1230 for me. So it is so quiet in the morning. Cause I have one developer who's on my time zone and then I have a PO who doesn't really communicate with us because he's used to communicating on west coast. So I have a solid four hour, like headstart to my team before they're online and working.

[00:33:34] Carol: So I get a lot of quiet time and the morning just like you. So I get to just code. I get to actually work and then my afternoons are answering questions, more meetings, handling emails and stuff. So I get that out quick. So I love that

[00:33:47] Tim: Yeah, that's cool. my wife's family lives in Sweden and Ireland. So when we go to visit, I'll spend a lot of time there and it's like, it's nice to be able to have that

[00:33:55] Tim: after hours when everyone else is not working. And you're like, it's your Workday

[00:33:59] Tim: and you can get all, you can get so much done

[00:34:01] Tim: because no

[00:34:01] Tim: one's responding.

[00:34:02] Carol: Yep.

[00:34:03] Carol: Yeah.

[00:34:05] Adam: Early on in our company history, Steve would work like evenings and Saturdays for that reason. Like nobody else has around, nobody's sending him any emails. It's just quiet, the phone doesn't ring and he can get stuff done. Like, I guess when you're starting a company from the ground up, you kind of have to have that hustle on the weekends sort of attitude.

[00:34:24] Adam: But, man, that's not for me.

[00:34:26] Ben: Yeah,

[00:34:26] Ben: definitely not.

[00:34:27] Small Talk

[00:34:27] Tim: So is anyone else sick with talking about the weather on meetings at the beginning?

[00:34:32] Carol: Yes. Oh yeah. That in sports, it drives me nuts. I don't know why it drives me crazy. Like to start a call and we're like, we're supposed to start at three and at 3 0 5, we're still discussing Alabama football versus Georgia football because Georgia be Alabama this year. What the hell can we just, start the meeting five minutes earlier and tell everyone the first five minutes is about football talk or the weather.

[00:34:57] Carol: Like, I, I don't know why it drives me crazy. I don't care about sports. I came to do like a job and that's all I want to talk about. So it's the noise, the hell out of me. It's bad. It's bad. Yeah, it was. You could see my face right now. Cause it.

[00:35:14] Tim: Uh,I'm totally the same, but I know I'm guilty of it. right. It's like, so you're waiting for someone to come, you know,it's like three o'clock meeting started two people haven't joined and you're just sitting there awkwardly on a, a teams call and you're like, so where are you guys at? Oh, Minnesota, how's the weather there.

[00:35:31] Tim: It was this snowing

[00:35:34] Carol: Then

[00:35:36] Tim: it dress. cause my, my, my father-in-law's British and the Brits love talking about the wetter. All they,they love talking about the weather. It's like this. As soon as my in-laws start talking about the weather, I'm like, oh, this is such a non-interesting topic.

[00:35:50] Carol: agree.

[00:35:51] Ben: Say there was a curb, your enthusiasm episode with Larry David, where he has to go to a dinner parties, like not looking forward to going to this dinner party. And when he gets there, it turns out that he and his wife are not sitting next to each other. There's a science seating. And he's like, this is ridiculous.

[00:36:05] Ben: I'm not going to talk to anyone, but my wife and his wife's like, just sit down, have a conversation. He's like, oh, you know what? I don't like small talk. So she's like, don't have small talk, ask interesting questions. So he sits down and turns to the guy next to him. He's like, you still enjoy sleeping with your wife.

[00:36:23] Tim: that's an interesting question,

[00:36:26] Adam: Yeah, I feel like I've seen it's either that clipper I've seen that episode, but was a good one.

[00:36:31] Ben: I do love a Larry David's story.

[00:36:33] Tim: but once the smalltalk starts, I don't know how to stop it politely. Right. I just feel like a jerk

[00:36:38] Adam: Yeah, I think the way to do it is to be the person in the room with the authority and to just put your foot down and say, okay, it's time everybody's here. And

[00:36:45] Adam: I sometimes play that role in my company, even though I'm not the top dog.

[00:36:49] Adam: but you know, like the it's very clear the meeting has ended and we're all just sitting there in silence for two or three minutes waiting for anybody to like pipe up with any last thoughts. And I'm just like, I guess we're done. And that's when like, oh yeah. Okay. So, and then people start disconnecting.

[00:37:04] Adam: So you have a good day.

[00:37:05] Tim: Beginnings and endings are hard. Right. So particularly it's like, all right, everybody's no one wants to be there. Are we done yet? Like, Yeah,

[00:37:13] Tim: It's like, everyone's dancing around it. Kind of saying goodbye without saying goodbye.

[00:37:17] Carol: Oh, no, we are really good at ending meetings at Clare capital. Like our team will immediately go, all right. Looks like everybody's getting some time back. Let's get off this thing. Like we want out of the meeting quickly. So it's bad because we all assume it's over with, and we start hitting in and someone's like, ah, and then we have to go to slack and say, did he ask a question or not ask a question?

[00:37:39] Carol: We all disconnected.

[00:37:41] Tim: Yeah. I mean that it's easier with your team, but w when it's with a customer,

[00:37:46] Tim: right. So there's a bit of politics there. my favorite thing to say is, well, it seems like we're done here. I'll give you back

[00:37:53] Tim: 10 minutes of your time here. And Tim has your time here and we'll, we'll wrap this up.

[00:37:58] Tim: All right. Take care. Bye bye. Collect done.

[00:38:02] Carol: Quickly end.

[00:38:03] Ben: Sometimes I get frustrated because it feels like the goodbye back and forth is like a four-part volley. You're like, all right. I guess I'll see you later. And then I say, okay, see you later. Okay. Have a great day. You have a great day. All right. Talk to you later

[00:38:17] Tim: Okay. Talk to you later. Okay. Good job. All

[00:38:20] Tim: right. Look forward to working with you.

[00:38:22] Carol: this isn't meeting really related, but it's goodbyes. So whenever I'm on a phone call with someone I'm like, okay, bye. And I immediately touch the red button on my phone. Like I don't wait. Cause I'm like, I'm assuming the conversation's done.

[00:38:35] Tim: She's brutal.

[00:38:36] Carol: call me back. People will be like, Hey, oh, one more thing.

[00:38:39] Carol: I'm like, no. We said goodbye. We agreed. This was done. Like, we're done no more

[00:38:43] Carol: conversation.

[00:38:44] Adam: was done.

[00:38:45] Carol: We're over this. But oddly enough, Steve is the exact same way. So it works out great because I never offend him by hanging up on him. So it's amazing.

[00:38:56] Ben: Yeah. Have you ever accidentally told someone you'd love them in a

[00:38:59] Ben: goodbye.

[00:39:01] Adam: Oh,

[00:39:03] Ben: All right. Talk to you later. Love you,

[00:39:06] Carol: Oh I just say that out

[00:39:07] Carol: of habit all the time.

[00:39:08] Tim: I've never done that, but someone. So I was talking to, she was like the secretary at work and she's like, all right. All right. Talk to you later. Bye. Love you. I'm like love you too. I'm like, she's like,

[00:39:21] Adam: like something.

[00:39:22] Tim: it just, it was a knee-jerk.

[00:39:24] Carol: Yeah,

[00:39:25] Tim: I mean, I care for you. I'm not in love with you, but,

[00:39:28] Carol: Well, just like it was her like accident. It was your accident setbacks.

[00:39:33] Tim: and she said, I love the fact that you said, I love you too. I'm like, okay. But don't take, don't read more into it. There was.

[00:39:40] Ben: I'll tell you one thing that I really appreciated. I worked with this guy. I don't even remember who was embarrassed to say that. I want to say maybe it was a couple of CTOs ago and he would get to the end of a presentation and he would say, does anybody have any questions? And he would just sit there for like a solid, he would let the silence go for like four or five minutes.

[00:40:01] Adam: Wow.

[00:40:02] Ben: And then he would say no questions. Nobody has any questions. And then he would sit there again

[00:40:07] Ben: for like a solid three minutes, just waiting. and I'll tell you at first I thought it was really awesome. But I think I grew to really appreciate it because I know in a meeting, especially when there's a bunch of people, everyone's typically embarrassed to be the person who asks questions or they're embarrassed to be the first person to speak up.

[00:40:24] Ben: But when you know that silence is not going to end like the person running the meeting is not going to prematurely, just be alright, I guess that's it. and force everyone to just sit there. It grants people, the permission to hesitate for a moment, gathered their courage, and then come forward with a question.

[00:40:40] Ben: I kind of like,

[00:40:41] The Golden Silence

[00:40:41] Tim: I bet you, he took, there was a, there's a course. I took called the hymen Miller, sales course,

[00:40:47] Tim: in, and they talk about the concept of the golden silence.

[00:40:51] Tim: And it was pretty impactful that I've, I do use that in meetings where you ask question, Right.

[00:40:57] Tim: And people give an answer. So the initial answer is like, so there's a part of your brain that just says I.

[00:41:05] Tim: I, I need to give an answer like the immediate kind of impulse answer. That's usually not the most interesting information that you're going to get. So as a sales person, you're supposed to stop. Once they give an answer, you, they answer the question, don't respond wait. And typically there is like three to four seconds of pause, and then there's a follow-up answer.

[00:41:31] Tim: And the follow-up answer tends to usually be the most insightful one because it gives the person's brain time to not give the knee jerk answer. But the actual more insightful answer, because they've had time to answer the question from a deeper part of their brain. And so, yeah, I do that a lot on calls.

[00:41:49] Tim: Like I'll ask a question and they'll give me an answer and I won't say. And it's really hard, That's easier in person. Cause you can sort of see people's body language where they're with their facial recognition. You can see that they're thinking about it still, but if it's a video call and people don't have their video on, or it's a phone call to just stop and don't respond to what they said and let them, and if they don't respond like, 10 seconds and you can jump in, but wait for that golden response at the end.

[00:42:24] Tim: So yeah, it's super impactful to do that.

[00:42:27] Adam: they give you any techniques for not making it awkward? You know, like the answer and they just sitting there full on eye contact, like

[00:42:35] Tim: I mean, no,

[00:42:36] Tim: I mean, seriously. I mean, you be, it feels awkward when you first do it because your natural response is to want to respond immediately to what they said, but if you're just. It puts it back on them and it allows them time to reframe what they said to you initially, and to see if what they said was true.

[00:42:56] Tim: So yeah, I mean, definitely try that if you're in a call with someone, you ask them a question, you really want a true answer from them. Don't be quick to respond. don't jump in with noise. just wait.

[00:43:08] Ben: I like

[00:43:08] Ben: that.

[00:43:09] Tim: I I've done it so many times and it's amazing how much more information you get from that pause, that golden pause where you're just like, okay,

[00:43:18] Adam: yeah.

[00:43:20] Ben: Nice.

[00:43:21] Carol: We're waiting. You didn't say anything.

[00:43:24] Tim: I wait for you to say something

[00:43:26] Carol: I was like 1, 2, 3, 4.

[00:43:30] Good Managers

[00:43:30] Ben: I was listening to an episode of Freakonomics today and they were talking about the Peter principle, which I'm pretty sure we've talked about on the show before this idea that you get promoted to your level of leased, ability. And, they were talking about, they were talking about whether or not the original observations by this guy, Peter, whether or not they can be reproduced.

[00:43:53] Ben: And there was some question about, how consistent those findings were in that. Did you actually become worse at your job as you were getting promoted and any way that the episode sort of tangents often to what makes a good boss and this idea of like, where do bosses come from? Do they get promoted?

[00:44:07] Ben: And which bosses make people more productive? And it was interesting because what they were saying is that it's really hard to. Evidence that boss has actually make anybody more productive. And when they look at all the different things that a boss can achieve in terms of outcome, they said probably the most valuable thing is, reducing churn that people don't leave companies.

[00:44:30] Ben: They leave bosses and managers, and that if you're a good boss, less people quit because of you. And that actually has the largest impact on the company overall, which is it's like one of those things I'd love to talk about, but I don't want to talk about to anyone. Who's actually a manager.

[00:44:48] Tim: Yeah. Yeah. The people in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence.

[00:44:58] Ben: But they were interviewing a woman on the show who, I think she was a graphic designer. I can't remember what she was exactly. And they kept promoting her and then she became a manager and she was like, I hated it. It was miserable. This is not at all. What I did. I was like, I didn't enjoy this. I didn't want to be around people.

[00:45:12] Ben: I didn't want to manage people. It wasn't what I was good at. And she ended up going back to being an individual contributor,

[00:45:16] Tim: Yeah.

[00:45:17] Ben: I relate to.

[00:45:19] Tim: Good segue, but I had nothing to.

[00:45:20] Tim: do with our topic.

[00:45:22] Carol: We can take that to the after show though.

[00:45:26] Ben: Sorry. It felt relevant when I was thinking about it. I don't know what happened.

[00:45:31] Adam: Okay. Well then I'm going to give you 10 minutes of your podcast, time back. And,

[00:45:38] Tim: love it.

[00:45:38] Patreon

[00:45:38] Adam: and I guess this is the part of the episode where I tell you that a Working Code is brought to you by accidentally saying, I love you listeners like you. If you like what we're doing here, you should consider supporting us on Patreon. We have a bunch of really great people helping us out over there, and we appreciate every single one of them special.

[00:45:53] Adam: Thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Peter. If you'd like to give us a hand there, you can go to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod. patronage starts as low as a dollar a month. all patrons get early access to an ad free version of new episodes and to our after show,

[00:46:09] Thanks For Listening!

[00:46:09] Adam: did you know that word of mouth referrals are the gold standard of marketing?

[00:46:12] Adam: I just made that out, but it does kind of sound good. So please, try to think of someone that you think would enjoy this podcast and suggest that they give it a listen. That's it for this week, we'll catch you next week. And until then

[00:46:22] Tim: Remember your heart matters. And with that, I will give you 10 minutes of your day

[00:46:28] Adam: you stole my line.

[00:46:31] Tim: I did.

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