Why do people schedule meetings and work-session into an arbitrary constraint of one hour blocks? Are we not capable of looking at the purpose and expected outcomes of the gathering and then estimating the appropriate duration needed to achieve the outcome? Do we not account for the cost and waste of having to reset context each time we meet and get to a partially finished state.It is the tyranny of the clock face, broken into one hour increments. The clock is just a human abstraction of time, an arbitrary measuring instrument. It is not a prescription for scheduling. I think we are misunderstanding the purpose of the clock. One doesn't drive a car by the speedometer.
This obsession of one hour increments of work is ridiculous. I wonder where we learn it. Oh - yeah, school, where we learn many bad habits.
See Also:
HBR article Yes, You Can Make Meetings More Productive
The Hummingbird Effect: How Galileo Invented Timekeeping and Forever Changed Modern Life
by Maria Popova. How the invisible hand of the clock powered the Industrial Revolution and sparked the Information Age.
Comments
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
Interesting thoughts...
What I'm referring to as the Tyranny of the Clock Face - is the assumption that a one hour block of time is the appropriate and sufficient time frame for a meeting of your colleagues to achieve a purpose. Had we used a non-Sumerians number system (Sexagesimal) - say Decimal (10 divisions in a day with 100 division of those whole units of sub-day e.g. French Revolutionary Time) would we still chose a meeting time of 1 "hour" (1/10 of a day in FRT)?