Fixpert

One of the biggest challenges in my professional life has always been trying to keep up with my workload while spending so much time in meetings. Take a look at the week I just had:

The white areas are time that I have to actually produce work. I tend to work well when I have 3 or more hours sectioned off just to get into a zone and be highly productive. The little 30 - 45 minute chunks between meetings usually don’t amount to much other than catching up on email.

In previous jobs, I used to be able to mark off blocks of time on my calendar as “busy” but I don’t think I’m able to do that at my new job. We’re working in a psuedo agile development style, where we are rapidly producing iterations (of wireframes in this case) and meeting at least once a day to discuss. This process has been super valuable and has resulted in a stronger final product. Less time has been wasted heading down the wrong path, but you can see the danger of losing too much time to meetings in this process.

My recommendation for a User Experience team considering an agile development process would be to emphasize quick (possibly impromptu) meetings that last no more than 30 minutes. We seem to still be caught up in “classic mode” as far as the length of our meetings — minimum 1 hour. If you block off 1 hour, the meeting will take at least 1 hour. Forcing short meetings keeps the conversation moving quickly and on-topic. Shorter meetings also are in the spirit of agile development and ideally leave reasonable chunks of time to get work done.

Has anyone else worked in an agile development environment as an Interaction Designer or Information Architect? Any ideas on battling time lost to meetings?