Oh, dear, Meg Ryan, yes, Yes, YES!!!!

[elfs]

The schedule of command, the schedule of creation:

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. … [Makers] generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.

Comments

[solarbird]

Yes, so much this.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

The folks in my lab (at the urging of the people actually *in* the lab) have made a policy of keeping meetings in the morning whenever possible. We've done a pretty good job of sticking to it, too. It helps.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Absolutely!

[shunra.livejournal.com]

And - as a maker right down to the core of my being - parenting, especially of small children, with its constant attention shifts, nearly destroyed me.

Kids older now, I can breathe again. How come no one tells you about *that* aspect of parenting?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oh, I learned that too. There's this decade-long hole where you can't possibly get the Big Blocks Of Time you need to do anything creative.

Even worse, I think I've lost the habit of exploiting those blocks. I got used to having only snippets-- using the Palm e-book reader instead a paper book, because I had ten minutes to read a few pages, browsing the RSS reader for frissions of emotive news rather than engaging the issues. I've been painfully, slowly rebuilding my attention span since the girls hit the (relative) self-maintenance age, but it isn't fun.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I keep wanting to install a tech solution: training kids in attention both for the long stretches and for the short ones.

Of course, training people for managing their attention economy may be the most important (and least likely) task of education. My impression of my education was that the only thing I was expected to do was sustain attention, not manage other modes.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

The Meetings Will Continue Until Productivity Improves