A note before we begin: this post deals with burnout, and may be upsetting. If you are affected there are some helpline numbers at the bottom of the page.
Greenbox has 16,000 subscribers across four cities, the Sydney integration is live, the Harvest Box systems are running in parallel with the Greenbox ones, and most of the original team has not yet met the new Sydney engineers in person. Tom’s calendar has 34 meetings scheduled this week. He has not deployed code in a fortnight.
Tom opens his calendar on Monday morning at 8:02 a.m. He looks at it. He closes his laptop. He opens his laptop again. He makes a noise that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh.
The week is a grid the colour of regret. Forty hours of scheduled calendar, and the grid is full. Thirty-four meetings, five recurring, three optional in a way that means you should probably come anyway. In the white space between meetings he has nine blocks of thirty minutes or less, which is what his calendar currently considers focus time. Two of those nine blocks are at 7am and one is at 6:30pm.
He drafts a Slack message to Priya. He deletes it. He drafts it again. He sends it.
how much focus time do you have this week
Priya replies eleven minutes later, from her own 8am meeting.
four hours two of them are lunch why
The DM chain that wasn’t a meeting
There is, Tom discovers when he starts looking for it, a group DM with seven people in it that has been active for about six weeks. Tom, Priya, Anika, Ifeoma, Ravi, Sam, and a senior engineer from Sydney called Hamish whom Tom has met once in person and four times on Zoom. The DM is called #the-rant. It has four hundred and thirty-two messages in it.
The messages are mostly complaints about calendars. Some of them are funny. Many of them are from 11pm or 6:30am. Nobody has proposed solving anything. The DM is the meeting nobody scheduled, about the meetings they all have too many of, and it is holding everybody’s sanity up in a way nobody has said out loud.
Tom reads back through about six weeks of it on a Monday evening, in bed, because he is not sleeping well. He realises, halfway through, that #the-rant is a community of practice by Jas’s definition. The domain is we are drowning. The community is the seven of them. The practice is the particular gallows humour they have developed. Nothing is being produced except solidarity. Which, Tom thinks, is not nothing, but is also not enough.
He screenshots a representative thread and sends it to Jas with no other message.
Jas replies at 7:14 the next morning, in sentences with full stops because Jas writes in sentences with full stops.
Yes. I’d already started. Want me to make it formal, pick nine people, two-week window, self-reported?
Jas instruments a fortnight
Jas picks nine people. Tom, Priya, Anika, Ifeoma, Ravi, Sam, Hamish, Maya, Yasmin. She asks them each to track, for two weeks, every calendar event they attend, purpose, duration, how many people, whether they spoke, whether the meeting produced a decision, whether it could have been a written note. She builds the spreadsheet over a weekend. She writes the spec short enough that all nine agree without a meeting about the spec.
The fortnight is the last two weeks of May. The acquisition is five days old when it starts. The Sydney team has joined the company Slack but has not yet joined most of the recurring meetings. By the end of the fortnight they have.
Jas collects the data on a Sunday evening and pastes it into a shared doc on Monday morning. The numbers are uglier than anyone had guessed.
| Person | Meeting hours/wk | Focus time/wk | Meetings where they spoke | Meetings that produced a decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tom | 35 | 5 | 19/34 (56%) | 4/34 (12%) |
| Priya | 36 | 4 | 22/31 (71%) | 6/31 (19%) |
| Anika | 33 | 7 | 24/28 (86%) | 8/28 (29%) |
| Ifeoma | 37 | 3 | 17/30 (57%) | 3/30 (10%) |
| Ravi | 36 | 4 | 18/32 (56%) | 3/32 (9%) |
| Sam | 29 | 11 | 25/27 (93%) | 12/27 (44%) |
| Hamish | 26 | 14 | 22/24 (92%) | 7/24 (29%) |
| Maya | 38 | 2 | 40/42 (95%) | 11/42 (26%) |
| Yasmin | 24 | 16 | 19/22 (86%) | 9/22 (41%) |
Maya stares at the spreadsheet for a long time. Forty-two meetings in a week. Two hours of focus time. She has been wondering why the quarterly strategy paper has taken her four weeks to write and is still a draft. The spreadsheet is the answer. The spreadsheet is also indicting Maya specifically more than anyone else.
Ifeoma, in the group DM: three hours of focus time. three. i have been building pager thursday on my weekends.
Tom: and of those 34 meetings only 4 produced a decision we couldn’t have reached in writing.
Hamish, from Sydney: at harvest box we had a thing called no-meeting wednesdays. it was the reason i stayed as long as i did. i miss it every week.
The meeting about the meetings
Jas books the one-hour session for a Thursday afternoon because she is the only person honest enough to book a meeting about the meetings without flinching at the self-parody. The room has Jas, Tom, Priya, Maya, Charlotte dialling in from Sydney, Hamish, and Sam. Ifeoma and Anika cannot come and Jas has promised them written notes. Yasmin is in Tokyo for an AWS conference.
Jas does not put questions on the board. Jas has, over the last fortnight, noticed that writing a list on a board invites people to answer the list rather than the question underneath it. She brings the spreadsheet on paper, one copy for each person, and a single question, which she asks without preamble.
“What do we keep?”
Maya answers first, because Maya has been thinking about this since Sunday and is relieved to be asked. “Thursday. Both of them. Pager Thursday. FinOps Thursday. Squad standups. The monthly all-hands. Sam’s ops review. My 1:1s with direct reports. That’s what’s non-negotiable for me.”
Priya: “I’d add modelling-Thursday. Ifeoma would add the SRE runbook review.”
Tom: “Nothing else is non-negotiable. If we kept just those, our weeks would halve.”
Charlotte, from the Sydney screen: “Good. Start there. Work inward from the keep-list.”
The hour is more argument than agreement. The three changes that come out of it do not come out in sequence. They come out of different corners of the conversation at different times, and two of the three are named by Hamish, which surprises nobody and Hamish least of all because his no-meeting-Wednesdays remark in the DM has been running in his head since he sent it.
Hamish says, early: “Block the mornings. Four hours per person, Tuesday to Thursday. Don’t call it focus, call it Maker, put it on everyone’s calendar, treat it like a recurring meeting the rest of the meetings can’t book on top of. The only reason no-meeting-Wednesdays worked at Harvest Box is that we put it on the calendar as a wall, and the wall held because it had a name nobody wanted to be the person who booked over.”
Priya, fifteen minutes later, half into a different conversation: “If we do that, the Thursdays need to change too. I don’t want them to but they will have to. They’re weekly. If Tuesday-to-Thursday mornings are protected, Thursday afternoons are the only synchronous option, and the queue backs up. Fortnightly, with the gist doing the alternate-week work. Which costs us something. I know it does.”
Charlotte, quietly: “That is the thing I was going to ask you to do and did not want to be the one to name.”
Sam, near the end, after ten minutes of Tom and Hamish arguing about the difference between manager time and actually working: “Can I say the thing that’s been on my mind for two weeks. We have twelve people turning up to the all-hands every fortnight and nine of them don’t speak. I write the notes afterwards, because I’ve been doing that since the company was five people, and the notes are fine. Why don’t we send the notes instead of the meeting, and do the Q&A for fifteen minutes, and give the other forty-five back?”
Maya: “Because we have always done the all-hands.”
Sam: “Yes. That’s the reason.”
Maya smiles. Sam does not smile back. Sam is in earnest. Maya makes a note.
By the end of the hour they have agreed, not in that order, to three changes. The Maker block, Tuesday to Thursday mornings. The Thursday-fortnightly compromise for the original and the modelling CoPs. Sam’s idea, which Charlotte calls the read-or-attend rule and Sam calls the notes are the meeting, which ends up being the wording that sticks.
Jas writes the three changes down on the last page of her notebook. She writes them in prose, in a single paragraph, because if she writes them as a list one of them will get lost when someone photographs a sub-clause and not the others.
What changed when people actually did it
Tom’s focus time went from five hours to ten in the first fortnight after the Maker block went on calendars. Ifeoma’s went from three to nine. Priya’s went from four to seven, then settled at six when she started writing modelling-Thursday’s gist more carefully, which took an extra half-hour a week and felt like the best trade of her month.
Maya’s focus time went from two hours to four. Two hours is the minimum she can live with, and four is twice that, and she is not going to pretend it’s enough but she is going to take it.
The read-or-attend rule had a messier fortnight of adjustment. Three people turned up to meetings to listen, and when it became clear they had been expected to read the notes instead, the notes got better. One all-hands became a written document with a thirty-minute live Q&A at the end, and the Q&A was richer than the all-hands had ever been. The first all-hands under the new shape had an awkward twenty-second silence at the start of the Q&A, during which Maya resisted the urge to fill it, and the first question when it came, from a Brisbane engineer who had never spoken in an all-hands before, was the most useful question of the quarter.
Hamish messaged Tom in week three:
this is the first company i’ve worked at where the meeting problem got fixed from the inside. usually it gets fixed by a new vp coming in and banning meetings on tuesday. that lasts six weeks. this one might last.
Tom: ask me in six months.
The cost was real too. Priya felt the Thursday change for about a month. She would catch herself on a Thursday afternoon that wasn’t a Thursday-Thursday, missing the shape of the room in a way she could not quite name. She wrote one evening in the gist:
The fortnightly cadence is right for our current size. It would have killed the original Thursday if we’d done it at the start. The meeting was building context that could not be built in a gist when we were four people who didn’t know each other’s vocabulary yet. Now the gist carries more, because we know each other’s vocabulary. A CoP is not a meeting. It’s a rhythm. The rhythm changes.
Jas read it in the morning. She added one line underneath, in a different pen.
The hardest maintenance is on the thing that’s still working.
The number
Marcus got hold of Jas’s fortnight spreadsheet in week four of the new shape because Marcus is the kind of person who sees a spreadsheet and asks what happens if we keep the methodology. Jas agreed, on condition that the number was self-reported, voluntary, and never used to evaluate anyone.
Marcus called the metric meeting tax, the hours per week lost to synchronous meetings that could have been asynchronous, measured as the gap between meetings-attended and meetings-that-produced-a-decision. It was, he said, a noisy metric but a useful one.
Pre-change, averaged across the nine: 27 hours per person per week.
Four weeks in: 14.
Marcus will measure again at 8 weeks and at 16. He does not tell Jas that he has started measuring his own team on it, voluntarily. She finds out in August when Yasmin messages her a screenshot of Marcus’s version of the spreadsheet.
What Charlotte said from the gate at Mascot
Charlotte caught the 6am flight back to Perth on a Friday at the end of the six-week experiment. The flight was delayed ninety minutes, which is the kind of delay that gives you time to think and not quite enough time to do anything about it. She sat at Mascot reading Jas’s fortnight spreadsheet on her phone and drafting an email and then deleting it and drafting it again.
Twenty minutes before boarding she gave up on the email. She called Maya instead.
Maya picked up on the second ring. “You’re not on a plane yet.”
“Delayed. I’ve got a question for you.”
“Go.”
“The meeting problem got fixed because the team that hurt from it also had the permission, the tooling, and the norms to fix it without waiting for you. That’s Thursday. It’s what Thursday has paid for, twice over. I want to make sure you notice that before the noise of the next quarter drowns it out.”
Maya, at a traffic light on Stirling Highway: “I’m noticing it.”
“Good. The other thing. Meeting tax will creep back up. It always does. Tell Marcus to re-measure quarterly. Tell Jas to watch the DM channels. A new rant thread is the early indicator.”
“Noted. One sentence each?”
“One sentence each. When you see one, do a fortnight audit before the DM becomes the coping mechanism. Don’t let it live where Thursday used to.”
Maya parked in the arrivals bay at Perth airport about twenty minutes after Charlotte’s plane took off from Sydney, a pick-up she had been going to offer anyway, and now particularly wanted to be at the kerb for. She sent Jas a single text with a screenshot of the call log.
Pin the DM-channel thing. Not as policy. As something you watch.
Jas did not pin it. She added the line, watch the DM channels for new rant threads, to the bottom of her own notebook, on the same page as the three changes, in the same prose paragraph. She did not put it on the list outside the meeting room. Some things, she had decided, were not for the list. Some things were for the notebook.
She photographed the notebook page and put the phone down. She would send it to Charlotte on Monday morning. Sending it on Friday evening would have broken one of the three things they had just committed to, and Jas was not going to be the first person to do that.
If any of this landed close to home, please be kind to yourself today.
Your company's Employee Assistance Programme, your GP, or a mental health professional are good places to turn. When you can't face those yet, a phone call to one of the lines below is a reasonable first step.
In Australia, all free and most 24/7:
- Lifeline — 13 11 14 — crisis support, 24/7.
- Griefline — 1300 845 745 — grief counselling, Mon-Fri 6am-midnight AEST.
- Beyond Blue — 1300 22 4636 — mental health, 24/7.
- 13YARN — 13 92 76 — crisis support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, 24/7.
Elsewhere: findahelpline.com will route you to a line in your country.
The Greenbox story is fiction. The feelings it touches on are not.
The merger is eight weeks old. The acquired team has its own practices, its own vocabulary, and a genuine suspicion of ours. Three CoPs become the bridge.