Having to go to a meeting really messes with your flow for the whole day, doesn't it?

Or the anxiety of what the meeting will be about that spans the entire morning beforehand.

Yeah I was gonna say, just go ahead and mirror that and also make the ball sad

I thought it was representing an unplanned "quick sync".

Either;

A. You don’t take on any new tasks before the meeting. You’re already too distracted by the meeting to start anything new. So now you’re sitting there killing time for an hour until the meeting starts. You were doodling in a notepad, missed the start of the meeting, and joined 5 minutes late.

B. You were working on something and didn’t realise it was meeting time. Someone messages you 5 minutes after the meeting started, reminding you to join. You’ve completely forgotten what the meeting is about and it takes you a further 5 minutes to get your bearings.

The time after the meeting is spent not wanting to engage in tasks you can’t accomplish before end of day, and watching the clock knowing the meeting screwed up the day.

Yeah my first thought was that this looks like an extremely optimistic take drawn by somebody without the issue.

Even having plans AFTER work can mess things up.

The good old Mythical Man Hour.

(In simple terms, as the number of people increases, the communications overheads also increase, generally faster, so if you have more people a greater proportion of time is wasted, hence work done doesn't increase proportionally to the number of people. Or if you just want to inform management that more people won't simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of "If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn't mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month")

The people that don't understand the problem usually are management, and I have to spend an exhausting time each day explaining to them why the problem exists and why it takes so long to fix it. I once was honestly telling them their meetings were a big part of the delays. Which then obviously led to more meetings on "how we can better communicate so we can have less meetings and more productive time". I wish I was joking.

I have about 3 meetings a week because I keep only the productive ones. I refuse to attend bullshit meetings.

My graph would look like the first one except after the meeting there's a huge burst of activity because now everyone is more informed about what needs to be done and how to do it.

To be fair, my work has a culture of ridigly policing meetings to keep them on topic, no chitchat, no rambling, anyone who starts that tends to get called out immediately.

What is your job? If those meetings are just 30 minutes that's already 5 hours.

My old job I used to have a lot of days where I'd have meetings every half hour or often consecutively. It was impossible to actually get anything big done because I'd just always be organizing notes from the last one or prepping for the next one. I between it was all I could do to put out fires. It was insane.

I've found medication helps the most lol

This is why you make your own work better, improve the team’s work, and position yourself as a candidate for team lead by insisting that meeting timeboxes are enforced.

Even if it breaks productivity by cutting things off the first few times, it will train everyone to get to the point, which will make everything better after the first few breakages.

This isn't adhd it is the legit flow from after a bullshit meeting. Then by the time you get ramped back up again it's the next meeting.

My only gripe to the chart is there should be some flat lining down near the bottom on the productivity side as a buffer pre and post. You spend time doing nothing wondering why you need to attend during pre-meeting time then during post-meeting time, doing nothing thinking about how you weren't necessary at that meeting. Then you begin the accel ramping.

yeah these memes are wayy to relatable

The bug fixes themselves can have massive cognitive overhead. I’ve spent hours thinking about a problem to make a very small change. It takes focus to fix complex problems correctly.

Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?

Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.

My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don't like it or disagree.

I don't respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I've hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.

And I don't actually work on any of those requests until there's a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn't done, I'm sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.

That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it's not always falling to you because you're not jaded enough to say no.

Yeah, this isn't an ADHD meme, this is a "normal human behavior" meme.

Well, damn, I've never seen that put so clearly before. I literally have been trying to schedule myself like a manager using half-day increments like a maker.

No the worst meeting is when the entire team — CEO, CTO, sales, engineering — spend all of Friday (every Friday) divvying up the tabs in a big excel spreadsheet, going and re-going through workflow checklists.

I knew they had no automated tests when I joined. I was promised, when I joined, that I’d be allowed to spend at least 25% of my time building an automated test suite for our app.

But we never had time to allow me to do that. So instead of spending 25% of my time developing an automated suite, which would steadily reduce the following until it was zero, we spent 20% of the entire company’s time doing human rspec tests.

One time the CTO asked me “Why wasn’t this caught in testing?” and I said “Because we don’t do any testing”

Huh. In theory, at least. In IT I've really only seen the status/blamestorm sessions. If I suggest that meetings aren't a good use of time, it's from that bias.

Two meetings a day sounds like luxury to me! I don't have ADHD but meetings still absolutely kill my productivity. The switching penalty for technical tasks is much higher than non-technical people realise.

Idk, our agile meetings are 5 minutes long, and it feels like a start to the day for me. Before the meeting I don't feel like doing anything.

The shitty part to those workplaces is that chitchat often helps your employment more than actually doing work. Likeable people get promoted, effective workers stay where they're at.

That's a terrible workplace culture, but it's fairly common.