Three-day no-meeting schedule for engineers
Maybe I&#x27;m off base here, but to me, meetings are not nearly as big a disruption to my IC work as random interruptions from teammates. Meetings are usually planned and able to be worked around and scheduled for. There is typically an agenda, and if there isn&#x27;t, it&#x27;s very simple to ask for one. If it&#x27;s not valuable, don&#x27;t go, or leave. If you must go, you can often get the meeting rescheduled - people in engineering organizations are surprisingly accommodating of the maker&#x27;s schedule.<p>A random interruption by an engineer when you&#x27;re trying to focus is much more disruptive because it&#x27;s unplanned and often pulls you right out of the zone. Often times, especially for more senior engineers, an enormous amount of patience has to be practiced as you listen to someone ramble on as the context in your head flutters away, while they go in circles explaining the problem to themselves.<p>This is all part of the job though. People don&#x27;t have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. My skills wouldn&#x27;t be nearly as valuable if the problems were so cut and dry that I could just program a solution straight through without interrupting anyone for clarity. I don&#x27;t quite get the hang wringing over being interrupted. It happens, and it happens especially more as you get more senior. Some of the best solutions to problems I&#x27;ve come up with have not been technical, but have come about by talking to people and realizing that maybe the technical solution we were pursuing wasn&#x27;t the best one, and we could save a lot of time and money by solving the problem a different way.