“Could we briefly discuss this?”

“I’ve set up a meeting for this!”

This is what many software engineers hear from their managers and co-workers. This will result in multiple meetings and interruptions scattered throughout the day. This is not a problem for most managers who operate on an hourly schedule, involving frequent shifts between various topics.

For software engineers (makers) this is madness, though. Every short interruption can lead to a significant amount of time lost before they can regain their full productivity. Sometimes a single midday meeting has the potential to profoundly impact an engineer's overall productivity.

I can only encourage every software engineer to talk to their managers and co-workers and explain that scattered meetings throughout the day are slowing you down and are thus stressful.

I’ve seen multiple solutions to this. A quite obvious one is to schedule meetings at the beginning or end of the working day in a consecutive block.

How do you and your organization deal with managers vs. maker's schedules?