It's been one of those weeks where it feels like I spent more time sitting in meetings or composing meeting notes than actually doing productive work. Wonder what it's like? Read the post Fireside Chat with Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Veen: “In-house vs. on your own” on the 37 Signals blog which is excerpted below
About the chatters Khoi Vinh is Design Director at the NY Times and creator of Subtraction.com. Previously, he was a founding partner at Behavior. Jeffrey Veen is Product Director for Measure Map, now owned by Google. Previously, he was a founding partner at Adaptive Path. Matt and Jason from 37signals moderated. Matt L. Khoi, what’s the biggest difference between your typical work day now versus when you were at Behavior? And Jeff, what’s been the biggest change since your shift from Adaptive Path to Google? What do you like better about your new job? What do you miss about your old one? Jeffrey V. Meetings! Khoi V. Meetings is right. Jeffrey V. At a large orgainzation, communication is different than in a small team. Khoi V. There are a lot of meetings for me — sometimes that’s about 60% of my week. Jeffrey V. Yeah, that sounds like my schedule.Matt L. What % of these meetings are necessary/productive? Jeffrey V. Hmmm… I’m not sure I could quantify that. Khoi V. I’d say about 90% of the meetings I attend are necessary and productive. There are very few time wasters. In a way, I’ve come to see meetings as central to the success of the design group I lead. They’re my opportunity to articulate the hows and whys of the design process. Jeffrey V. Meetings are a byproduct of scale, For example, when we were working on Measure Map, we could come to a conclusion with five people very quickly, and launch something new. Jeffrey V. But at Google, there are far more dependencies.
About the chatters Khoi Vinh is Design Director at the NY Times and creator of Subtraction.com. Previously, he was a founding partner at Behavior. Jeffrey Veen is Product Director for Measure Map, now owned by Google. Previously, he was a founding partner at Adaptive Path.
Matt and Jason from 37signals moderated.
What I miss from my old days on the XML team at Microsoft is that I often would take a day off from meetings and either shut myself in the office to get work done or work from home. Somewhere along the line I lost that habit and now every day I spend most of the day either in meetings or killing time between meetings.