8 a.m. meetings suuuuck

Ugh. I know it’s for an important reason, but I hate 8 a.m. meetings. Software engineers are often late-night folks. I say we work on organizing a new holiday, “Software Engineer Week” for the last full week of January. The only rule I’ve come up with so far is: no meetings until 10 a.m.

66 Responses to 8 a.m. meetings suuuuck (Leave a comment)

  1. you know what they say Matt, If you go into a meeting without knowing the outcome beforehand, you’re wasting your time…you haven’t done enough research on the issue.

    I’d prefer 8am meetings than the way my old company used to work… He’d schedule meetings for 5pm… that would last 3 or 4 hours..

    Or he’d schedule clients to come in for demos / meetings at 8am.. which means I’d have to be there at 6/7 to prepare.

    I love not having clients now… Creating my own projects and getting to see them through is a great job.

  2. I vote for “no meetings until 11:00 a.m.” so people have a chance to fix things first.

    P.S. You better wake up some of your fellow software engineers because the cache no longer works, there are red X’s in place of “images/promo_right.gif” and “images/promo_left.gif,” and the text string advertising your promotion for “Info when you want it, right on your desktop” overwrites the last result on an 800×600 display.

    Brian M

  3. >>Software engineers are often late-night folks

    soo true…

    I don’t know, but for some reason I am more productive if I work late in night rather than early in the morning.

    And the worst thing to do first in the morning is to attend a meeting particularly from the senior management. 🙂

  4. There’s worse things. I used to loathe getting up early. Through high school and college, my dad would sometimes have to resort to dousing me with a glass of water to get me up. I could never understand how he could get up at the crack of dawn with a full head of steam. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and now I get up early on my own and I’m worthless past 9PM. I suspect its genetic. Of course, I didn’t inherit the tireless work habits, generous spirit, or even the artistic abilities. No. I got the receeding hairline, sagebrush eyebrows, and the inability to sleep past 5-6 AM.

  5. What’s a meeting?

  6. Meetings are no fun. I would rather it be early in the morning because as Ryan said, nothing worse than working a full day, get close to quitting time and have to go to a meeting just before walking out the door for a few hours. I dread that. Especially think tank meetings that have no organization what so ever. Everyone wants to be heard because they have this fresh new idea that will never come in to play anyway. Oppps, yes i am jaded about meetings in general.

  7. There is never a good reason for an 8 a.m. meeting. What are you talking about Matt? Clearly you woke up too early and are still shaking off the cobwebs. I think you should read this again after lunch and revise that sentence.

  8. Meeting n.

    1. Useless.

  9. “Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate. –Dave Barry” 🙂

    8 a.m. meetings *DO* suck man. At least you have an excuse to leave early though;)

  10. Meetings that early are only worth it when you’re getting paid OT and they’re supplying the coffee and breakfast. Otherwise, I’d rather stay in bed. 😛 That being said, most meetings are pointless bitch sessions…at least in my experiences…

  11. If I was ever scheduled for a meeting before 11, I would show up in my bathrobe and slippers, then put a pillow on the table and put my head down.

    Hell, I showed up, that is all they can expect from me if they pull that sort of thing.

    You should also point out that it only seems to be those lazy morning people that schedule things at 8. Are they ever there at 2:00 AM hacking away? I don’t think so.

  12. Totally unrelated, but Matt I wonder how much of a chuckle you guys at the Plex got from Sue Deckers comments yesterday and how much more from this post: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000239.html

    Seems like they are in total denial and part of their higher ups aren’t even on the same page.

  13. 8am meetings suck? Matt, MOST meetings suck!!! 😉

  14. Matt,

    Can you explain how you implemented your 301 redirect with WordPress (from non-www to www)?

    Thanks,
    Preston

  15. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had my coffee yet, but I don’t see mattcutts.com redirecting to http://www.mattcutts.com...

  16. open your .htaccess file.

    Type this:
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOURSITE.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURSITE.com/$1 [L,R=301]

  17. Forget the time – most meetings turn out to be useless on the whole. How often to people follow-up on what happens at the meeting? How often is new ground broken? I’m really trying to totally reduce the quantity of meetings overall. Vendors can largely forget wasting my time – email me pricing and stock status, and that’s it.

  18. When’s the PageRank update? I have a newer site and I want to see what it’s actual PR is, not what is published. I know its gotta be higher than a zero.

    Or maybe you can use your super powers to send me an email and let me know. 😛

  19. yeah it’s been a while. I got 3 or 4 sites that have tons of new links now, and still no pagerank..

    Also, want to see the effects of switching my dictionary from noslang.com/dictionary.php?l=a to noslang.com/dictionary/a type urls instead…

  20. Hi Matt,

    Nice job on waking up the ‘plex about the problems. It looks like they have all been fixed (or ripped out). I just wish there was a quicker (and less visible) way to let you know about these things.

    Anyway, maybe now you can have that meeting…

  21. Hey Matt:

    8:00AM sucks but try having clients on the East coast who want 8:00AM meeting when you are in LA!

    HEY: as an aside, the tom-tom systems is in great fear of an update coming in three weeks. Interesting that they have no clue what is it but strongly believe that we are three weeks away from the Mother of All Updates.

    The best guess is that it is believed that all hyphenated URLs will be cleaned from the face of the Google Datasphere.

    Or, that any site with a shared IP will drop dramatically.

    Or, that the seamonster Nessy will take away everyone’s birthday.

    Anything looking like its three weeks away? Should I buy that hair shirt and lash?

    Cheers,
    Ted

  22. I agree with you Matt. You are right that most people involved with the internet in some form or another burn the midnight oil a lot. Being a Realtor and also working on a website tends to cause you to work very late hours.

    When you have to deal with the likes of GOOGLE…hehehe you have to burn that midnight oil or you suffer the rathe by not getting any business from the search engines.

    Its tough working on your sites till 3 or 4 am and then having to be at a meeting at 8 am the next morning. I feel your pain.

    Since you understand the pain, if you were to make my site # 1 on Google for its city plus real estate I could stop burning the midnight oil… BIG SMILE. This also would rid you of one less site to discuss with the engineers about..another BIG SMILE.

    This is another reason I believe the creator of Starbucks was a webmaster or employee maybe of Googles in the past.

  23. Every good email client/mail server system allows you to set “your” business hours and it would show your non-business hours as not available to schedule a meeting.

    I also block my calendar from a certain time in the afternoon to avoid a 5.00 PM meeting when I want to go home. No meetings for me past 3.30 PM. Works awesome.

    Important 8.00 AM meeting? Is the update and PR change going life this week? 😉

    Christoph

  24. Ted Z, I really hope you’re wrong.

    Think about it.. having a shared IP has absolutely no indication of how relevant a website is. Most people don’t even know enough about shared / static IPs anyway..

    Also, there aren’t enough static IPs to go around. I have close to 30 websites on the same 2 IP addresses. 1/2 of them aren’t related to each other at all.. one of them is an authority site on it’s topic (internet slang).

    Penalizing shared IPs would kill google’s search results. They’d lose the search war..game over.

    Same with hypenated domains. some hypenated domains make sense. Look at http://www.home-cost.com versues homecost.com the hyphen one is a valid website, should he be penalized because some spammer beat him to homecost.com and probably wants an extraordinary amount for the url?

    making any of those changes would get me to stop using google. It would definitely make it’s results irrelevant.

  25. I think Ted Z is just saying outrageous stuff for the hell of it. Penalizing shared IPs and hyphenated domains would be ridiculous, and I think all of us know that. I don’t think his comment was to be taken literally. 😛

  26. When asked to attend an 8 AM meeting, I say, “Sorry, I never stay up that late.”

  27. YIKES!

    Julie is right. While there are people waiting for the mother of all updates in 3-weeks, they have no clue as to what it might be. Maybe Nessy knows!

    Sorry for the confusion!

    Cheers,
    Ted

  28. Matt,

    Unrelated to this thread — currently when I do a Google search I can not get past the first page of results. A Google Desktop ad is in the lower right-hand corner of the page and it seems to have rendered useless the linked numbers to more results pages.

  29. You could try buzzword bingo make it better

  30. Matt, can you fix google so I can search past the first page. The google desktop ad on the bottom broke my next page function !!!!

  31. I was once asked to come in for an 8 a.m. meeting at a previous company. I showed up, and afterwards my ubermanager, knowing I was a night owl, made a point of personally thanking me for getting up that early.

    My response? “What do you mean “getting up early”? I figured it’d be easier to stay up late.”

    He believed me until I did break down and tell him that yes, I’d actually gotten up early.

  32. I sent Google a message a while ago about this new problem via the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the very bottom of the page. But, who knows how long it is before somebody notices that message…

    Hopefully, Matt will check out these posts soon…

    Brian M

  33. Hey Matt you guys going to fix that little problem at the bottom of your serps in IE.

    Talk about a lame blunder.

    They are now cleaning the torture devices on WebmasterWorld.

    Threads are open and collecting comments from the rabble.

  34. I vote for 12 noon meetings. Then, Google can serve you lunch and you can relax after a good night’s sleep

  35. Could be worse old boy, you could be a chinaman looking for a little uncensorsed info 😉

  36. just start making unilateral decisions, matt. works for me.

  37. I think you are completely right on this one. Local time over here: 02:23 AM and still working…

    Unfortunatly i have to be up and running @ 09:00 AM again…

  38. RE “What’s a meeting?”

    Where good ideas are beaten into a culdesac.

    Feeling tired? Work getting you down? Need more sleep? Call a meeting!

  39. I had an 8am meeting at the Googleplex while I was in San Jose for SES, and boy did it feel early! Especially since it was following the WebmasterRadio’s Search Bash party the night before. There is a reason those breakfast smoothies in the cafe at the ‘plex can be loaded up with all kinds of trendy health additives 😉

  40. David, the problem was noticed early and a fix was getting ready before I even heard about it..

  41. Good morning Matt

    I can see that the latest Gadgets post was last year 🙂

    Review: Bigha green laser
    December 15, 2005 @ 9:25 am · Filed under

    IMO, no Gadgets no Glory 🙂

    Have a great plex day.

  42. I am sorry I know this is off topic but what is the best way to report the smartest but yet the worst spam I have ever seen to google Matt. I think even you would be amazed. I dont believe the spam report form gets looked at and this is very smart what they did. If I was a spammer I would use it myself, its that well hidden.

  43. Here in Asia, us folks who worked for US companies would always have to tone down the enthusiasm of corporate types who wanted to start the day with 7:30 breakfast meetings. I do think this is an American phenomenon.

  44. Matt

    I hope you talk about BD in the meeting 🙂

    EG – Well done you are starting to at least crawl homepages again – but where is the rank for these pages ?

    Patience still required ?

    Cheers

    Stephen

  45. Meetings are great. You can communicate with your people and within an hour you know the status of things and everybody knows what to do. 8am is indeed a bit early.

  46. Hey Matt,

    Did this 8am meeting have anything to do with you working at Yahoo!?

    > The new BigDaddy data center contains new code for examining and sorting the Web, and once it has been tested fully, will become the default source for Web results, according to Yahoo!’s chief search engineer Matt Cutts. In a January 6 post on his blog, Cutts said that might happen in early February or March of this year.

    http://directmag.com/searchline/1-25-06-Google-BigDaddy/index.html

    Is this a typo, a Freudian Slip or breaking news!! 😉 lol

    martin

  47. I’ll say this.

    8 a.m. meetings are WAY better than 12pm or 1pm meetings.

    Lunchtime meetings for someone who is busy all day (and often skips breakfast) tend to leave the person starving and unable to think about anything but lunch.

    Post lunchtime meetings are when food is settling adn you want to take a nap. The perfect time to be in your office at your desk. Not in a meeting full of witnesses to you nodding off. 🙂

  48. My old boss was one who believed that productivity was only measured in lines of code.

    IE, if you spent a day producing a database diagram and requirements document he’d say you wasted that day, he has nothing to show the client.

    He then made us fill out time sheets to the minute with how long we spent all day doing different things…

    He finally got the point when I’d turn in stuff like
    “2 hours in meeting discussing last week’s time sheets”
    “3 hours in meeting that resulted in scheduling 2 more meetings”
    “1 hour filling out this time sheet.”

  49. Time of meeting doesn’t matter much if chairs are removed, try and find out!

  50. that what i like of being your own boss, no more meeting ! 🙂

  51. Hi Matt

    Just thinking how Google views a page in English with anchor text links in foreign languages and URLs inbounding: Przenośne OOo, страници шаблони, jaquettes et étiquettes, Etikettenvorlagen, Druckvorlagen, dokumentaal, großen Schwung praktischer, 開放源碼開發平台, pagina, Mallar, אסופת תבניות, @ƒI[ƒvƒ“ , 開發平台 and a few more!

    That must be more bamboozling for the spider that trying to figure out what the hell they talking about at a 8 am meeting. Thats still REM time.

    Ciao

  52. Actually, an 8 a.m. meeting can be very effective if only “the larks” attend it. Instead of doing the routine, they can effectively brainstorm on some strategies..might be very productive, esp if the folk is smart, too.

    Yeah, I noticed that most developers, programmers and the like get up late and stay up late. Occupation influence?

  53. LOL Ryan, my ex-coworker insisted on reporting time spent on every task too. And I was just going to do that: include time spend on writing every report. Btw I did some calculations. At least several hours a month only for that..which makes it 0.5-2% of all work time..does it worth it that much?

  54. Meetings are for managers.

    Work is for employees.

    To bad employees have to do both.

  55. Good morning all

    Just wonder whether Inigo is still at that 8 a.m. important meeting.

    Or maybe he is at home preparing the next great Gadgets post. Or he mightbe writing few Kentuckian jokes that he promissed me to post soon 🙂

  56. It’s a pleasure to read your podblogs….now ..my question is: “Why do you guys ponder so in debt about breakes and hours of activity…8 am or 10am and ..hey are you looking for work?
    Bless your grand mission, but kindly tell me if this business of publishing audio/words…. a lucrative business or not?
    Johan

  57. hello there!
    Bonjour,
    Hmmm… I’ve been doing conference call and meeting each mornig at 8h00 for 10 days. I do agree. Defeniteley. We must change the world and organize meeting only past 22h00 and in a bar. Ideas would certainly come up quikly !:-)
    Have a nice week-end (hello from Paris)
    Nico

  58. 48 SEM’s agree, 8am meetings suck…..
    (hailing back to a Kids In The Hall joke….. 30 Helens agree….)

    ooooooo snap!
    http://seoblog.intrapromote.com/2006/01/the_matt_cutts.html

  59. An 8 A.M. meeting at my workplace was code for “come in unprepared around half-eight”. Now the doors are locked at 8.05 A.M. – by me.

    If you work at a very productive org’, scheduling these meetings are fine. If you’re not doing it, your competitors probably are.

  60. I havea good definition of meetings (and other stuff) at http://www.isham-research.co.uk/dd.html

    Note the hyphenated URL – been like that for years.

    Know I know ho wto report spam to Google – but does anyone know a way that WORKS? One set of competitive keywords in the UK is completely blocked by spammers.

  61. I hate about cancelation meetings. They always call me when the time is near meeting.

  62. It is even worse when your secretary doesn’t tell you about cancelled meeting and you are in the conference room 8 am by yourself.

  63. Are 301 redircts google friendly?

  64. oh i understand you :)) i just hate 8 am meetings 🙂 all i want to do is to sleep

  65. That must be more bamboozling for the spider that trying to figure out what the hell they talking about at a 8 am meeting. Thats still REM time

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