This was my first week at Umba. While chatting with other full-time employees, I've come to realize how much of their time is spent on meetings. In fact, their schedule is overpacked and overburdened with them. They are involved in so many teams and projects that I don't think I've seen them sit at their desk and just work for more than 45 minutes. I think this is really bad.
It seems to be movement without progress. Noise without communication. Complicated airflow if you will.
I wonder if this is just a function of being at a startup that is going through growing pains. After all, the office I am working in had just 6 people just weeks ago. Now it has close to 17.
Even then, I feel as though emails are underutilized at Umba. In an effort to communicate, we end up trying to schedule meetings for everything and using 5+ platforms for everything from standups, to sprint tickets, direct messages, process documentation and more. Well written, well thought out long form thoughts are not present anywhere.
This sheer volume of context switching without the ability to enter a flow state makes it incredibly easy to become distracted by ultimately meaningless and menial work without accomplishing genuinely valuable tasks.
Context switching is valuable yes, but I imagine it is easy for most people. Balancing that with entering flow states is what's difficult. We need less open offices and more us time. We need more time to actually work and less time on slack, less time switching between tabs, less wavering…more doing!