Entries Tagged 'Wasted Time' ↓

I sat through an hour long meeting this week where the final decision was that we wouldn’t do anything.

To make things worse, this wasn’t the first meeting on the topic. I’d already wasted an hour and a half listening to everyone talk about nothing the week before.

The sad thing is I could have predicted the final outcome of the meetings and saved us all some time.  The room was packed, it’s crazy to think how much money was spent on the salaries of all the people in the room for those two meetings.

It seemed that I was the only one who could see how ridiculous the situation was. No one else seemed to mind that we’d wasted all that time discussing something that was a foregone conclusion. I’m sure if I could have sent a bill for my hourly rate to everyone in the meeting it would have been much shorter and probably not happened at all.

Riding the Tidal Wave of Useless Meeting Invites
One of the dangers of working for a corporation is that anyone with access to Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes can try and ensnare you in a useless meeting about nothing with only a click of their mouse.  There typically aren’t “best practices” for a meeting setup, everyone’s always so willing to waste your time with another meeting request.

Of course, you do have the power of the decline button.  To keep yourself sane and productive, your default response to any meeting request should be Decline.  If it really is important they’ll follow up with you personally and you can screen the meeting on your waste of time meter.

We all know that despite sending multiple Decline messages, we’ll still get roped sooner or later into some meetings that just waste hours of our lives.  The best way to break free of these worthless meetings is to just leave the corporation. Take yourself out of that wasteful environment.

How many times have you been tempted to trash your pager in any number of creative ways, never to be head from again?

I Hate the Pager
Isn’t it sad to think of the number of hours of our lives we’ve wasted acting as servant to the ever-insistent, ever-annoying pager? My latest experience came this Sunday afternoon as the pager chirped minutes after I sat down at my computer to work on my online businesses.

Wasted Hours
I called the number on the pager and gathered from the business person on the other end of the phone that there was a problem with a transmission from another division of the company. This is a client that’s been around for several years and the people that wrote the system have long since come and gone. My heart sunk as I realized the complexity of the issue, the outlook for my weekend afternoon, and the hopelessness of my situation.

Tech Support Sucks
Who likes spending a whole Sunday digging through poorly documented scripts, config files, and code trying to figure out how the hell a system works and why the foobar job won’t run? Everyone you call for help either doesn’t answer their phone or isn’t close to a computer so can’t help. Who blames them? I mean its Sunday, it’s supposed to be a day where you don’t have to worry about the corporate B.S. It’s supposed to be a day where you can live your life, free of the shackles of work.

Tell Someone Who Cares
Ever feel like telling someone that? They page you with this “urgent issue” in the middle of the night and you’re supposed to give a damn about it? I have no problem staying up to 2–3 in the morning working on web projects. I do it all the time, for MY own businesses. I’ll work all hours to make money for myself since my income will be in proportion to the amount of hours I work. In a corporate job, we get paid the same whether we work 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week so what motivation do we have, other than keeping our job, to bust our ass when the pager goes off?

Working for Myself
I decided working insane hours just to keep my crappy job isn’t worth it when I can make more money and be happier working for myself. Do you have to carry a pager? What are you doing to free yourself from its brutal grip on your life?

One of the things I hate about my software job are the ridiculous time-wasting meetings I have to sit through every week. As I advanced from regular programmer to team lead these meetings became more frequent and really dragged on my productivity.

Avoiding Meetings
If you haven’t read the book the 4 Hour Work Week I’d recommend checking it out. The author, Tim Ferriss, talks about guarding your time by forcing as much communication and decision making as you can through email or phone calls and going to meetings as a last resort. He calls it “the art of refusal and avoiding meetings”.

Wasted Afternoon
I started applying his suggestions and found myself in fewer meetings and being more productive. Unfortunately, I’m not a productivity ninja like Tim and still get roped into meetings that are a waste of time. Just yesterday I thought I had successfully dodged a meeting that had no benefit to me until the last second when my boss swung by my cube and cornered me into wasting an hour of my time during a critical part of the afternoon.

Killer Zombie Meetings
These types of mindless meetings that keep you from getting your job done so you can get on with your life are just another reason that software jobs suck. We do what we can to avoid them but like a herd of killer zombies they just keep coming, and coming, and coming for us. There is no where to hide, you’ll have quit your job to finally be safe from the killer zombie meetings.

Have you ever poured your effort into a project only to have it canceled and shelved? How about this one, have you ever had your boss intentionally delete a project you’ve spent weeks and months of your time on?

Hello Wiki!
Every time we asked for a knowledge base in our group we’d hear some song and dance about issues with implementing the corporate standard until we finally stopped asking. Instead, we took matters into our own hands and created a Wiki site that took off like wild fire. I spent countless extra hours moving documentation from isolated network drives into the new knowledge base and training everyone on it’s usage.

We were rockin and rollin, capturing tribal knowledge that had long been locked inside the head of developers. We were creating a knowledge base that made us more efficient and our jobs easier, it was awesome. We had escaped the inertia of our productivity sucking corporation and were sharing information Web 2.0 style!

Goodbye Hard Work
I guess in a crappy corporation all good things come to an end. The hard drive for the NIS server in our group crashed and work slowed to a snails pace. The architeture team needed a new hard drive and that spelled disaster for our beloved Wiki.

If you’ve ever worked in a big company, you know how many levels of procurement tape you have to cut through just to buy a damn paperclip. There was no way our boss was going to get a new hard drive anytime soon so the architecture group was in a rough spot. Of course we could have picked up a new hard drive at Best Buy, Circuit City, or Comp USA for $100 and gone to the trouble of expensing it but instead the boss decides to scavenge existing hardware.

Software Jobs Suck
With only a few minutes notice the hard drive storing all the valuable knowledge we’d accumulated in the Wiki was wiped clean and repurposed. Thanks to BS corporate policies and a horrible management decision all the hard work and documented knowledge went down the toilet. Just another crappy day at the office.