Some days at work I’ve got only half-hour gaps between meetings. I don’t care how adept people are at taking meetings, no one is going to get proper thinking work done in those gaps. If it was repetitive work, sure, you could get back into the groove of things, but even that takes some wind up time. Even worse if you’re in-office and expected to attend the meetings in-person.
It’s not uncommon for me to only have one or two 30-minute breaks between 8:30am and 5pm. I’ve gotten to the point that if I have over 2 hours without meetings I often feel like I get nothing done, because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a few things (emails or messages, not deep work) knocked out in the 5-10 min in between calls. I can only really focus on deeper work at night after everyone else has signed off.
Not really a sustainable way of doing work, I’m also not doing as much hands-on work these days. A lot of my meeting time is 1-on-1s with my team and making sure they have what they need to move forward, make decisions, and get work done or with other people to try to remove barriers to help the team be able to move forward. So in that sense, the meetings ARE the work.
A bit of an exaggeration but a lot of people will never understand that some people do not have much of a social battery left at the end of the day.
I have had so many people including rl friends, exs, or people I used to play online games with fail to understand that I don’t have that much energy in the evenings or even on the weekends sometimes. There’s dealing with my boss, dealing with my coworkers, dealing with people from other firms. Sometimes through teams, sometimes through the phone, sometimes in person.
“Just make shorter call.”
That’s even worse.
Introverts working at a call center.
An hour long call? I normally laugh at these, but nah, a fucking hour long call? Yeah, I need some prep and recoup time
I had a fucking three and a half hour meeting last week. I seriously considered telling the organizer to fuck off when I saw that in my calendar.
The only people I have calls that long with are people I love but can’t see in person. Recovery is usually quite short then.
A 10-15 minute call will probably need some prep and recovery time though. With people I like it’s because we didn’t get into the flow yet. With people don’t consider friends anxiety is just there.
One of our help desk reps spent 45 minutes on the phone helping someone set up their authenticator app for MFA. It’s a simple install of an app and linking it to your account. If the user listens and does as instructed, it takes about 2 and a half minutes. If they don’t? 45 minutes.
The rep took their break and worked on something else for a while to recover.
Been there done that
And the worst part is? My job description doesn’t even include phone support. I am just the guy who is handy with computers! (I do get compensation for it, don’t you worry)
I work at an MSP and I have calls like this twice a month. I hate it
I could see myself in that situation (the user), which is why I so much prefer text. Either I could get distracted or bring some technical issue upon myself by trying (or continuing) to do things differently, or both combined.
I mean, for example even with something simpler like this if company wanted me to use my personal device. I may not be using a recent Android or iOS device in the future, or I may simply not want the company software on anything I use personally.
I don’t know what the case here was, but perhaps it made some sense.
Replace Call with Zoom meeting.
That’s just a video conference call
During the pandemic at school I was able to mostly get out of these by reducing it to basically a presentation.
First, bandwidth limiting to prove “bad internet connection” and inability of using camera. Simplest way was using mobile data on 2G EDGE.
Second, unlistenable audio. Increase microphone gain to maximum and nobody will want to hear you.At that point you may even be requested to not use either camera nor microphone, like I was. Problem solved, video call -> presentation.
Most likely won’t work for your job though.
Inaccurate the whole screen isn’t blue
The prep and recovery blocks are also team calls; everyone prepares and recovers together, moderated by the scrum master.
