Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

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> Meet for 1hr every week as a team, and go over what everyone is working on and see how we’re progressing, and forecast where you should be by the next week.

So you're spending longer and getting less accurate results?

> The moment a developer feels they may not be able to deliver what was expected by next week’s status meeting, they share that with the team in whatever asynchronous communication tool your team uses, whether it’s chat, email, etc.

What prods them to think about that though? Often there's no clear threshold, and if you're supposed to keep it on your mind continuously then that's taking away from your capacity to think about what you're building. Having that daily sync point to take stock is very useful.

> It doesn’t matter how small the daily standup is. It could be 5 minutes. But it’s a daily context switching exercise. I think it’s far better to have a single weekly, but longer meeting, so there’s only 1 context switch in the entire week.

I mean hopefully you're switching out of work context when you go home or go to lunch. It's a tradeoff, but a few minutes a day isn't so intrusive IME.

Weekly isn't terrible, but I'd look at it from the other side: how long is it ok to be blocked for before you want to make sure you remember to raise things? A day works best IME. Maybe even twice daily would be better.

> I mean hopefully you're switching out of work context when you go home or go to lunch. It's a tradeoff, but a few minutes a day isn't so intrusive IME.

I don't think that is what was meant by context switch persay. It's like reading a fiction book, the context is the story. If you put that down, you might have to come back and re-read the last few pages to remember where you were exactly.

Worse yet for meetings, personally, about 15 minutes before I have to stop doing mostly anything so that I'm not too into it to then be late. About 5 minutes before I literally do stop everything otherwise I'll get into something and look back at the clock and it'll be 3 minutes past the hour.

A productivity hack I'm trying is to set an alarm for a few minutes before a meeting so I can do this more reliably without so much of a context switch.

All in all, given about 10 minutes before the meeting it is intentionally doing little so you can click that button on time, and then there is the time needed to get back into your work (most literature says it takes about 20 minutes to regain programming context), any meeting costs about 30 minutes of context switch overhead. It's a lot of time given a 8 hour work day.

You don’t wait for the meeting to raise things. You raise them when they happen. We have enough async communication tools that you can raise issues without having to wait for a meeting, and yet without disturbing someone who may be focused on something specific.

Really easy to thrash at something for days though thinking you are ‘almost there’. And someone else on the team might be able to help either directly or help you think of the solution if you just spoke out loud with the team sharing information.

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