---
title: You have to make it feel less good, or make it more friction-ful
date: 2025-07-31T07:40:08.962Z
slug: 2025-07-31-you-have-to-make-it-feel-less-good-or-make-it-more-friction-ful
author: Thomas Wilson

---
Recently at work I found myself in a discussion about meetings.  Specifically the feeling that certain parts of the organisation had too many meetings and also they often overran time and scope.

If I may briefly strain credulity: I have heard similar conversations before, and not _just_ within this team.

It is hardly a new pain or observation.  Especially as a distributed team, it is very common for us to spend a lot of time in online meetings.  At times I think attendance of these meetings is conflated with actual work.

To use the parlance of Cal Newport's _Slow Productivity_, this is "pseudo-productivity", i.e.:

> in modern knowledge work we associate activity with usefulness ([source](https://calnewport.com/the-workload-fairy-tale/))

There are a handful of ideas about reducing the burden of activity or busyness that  isn't actually the core value-add activity, e.g. building software.  It might be _about_ that core activity, but it _isn't_.

I think the fact that the pseudo-productivity actions are about the core activities makes them even easier to conflate with each other.  At least, easy to conflate if you are outside of the core professions or functions that directly contribute to the product, e.g. a researcher, a business analyst.  I don't think a lot of skilled technical writers are mistaking a meeting about the deadlines and constraints of a specific project for actually generating technical documents.

To use words of Ed Zitron:

> We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff... Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers ([source](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/))

Zitron is cynical, sure, but is he _too_ cyncial?  You'll have to decide where you land on that, but I think it would be unwise to dismiss it for lack of positivity.

I think that a key part of any serious solution to this problem, that of "too many meetings, not enough doing", is to make it harder to have meetings.  That means making the meetings either feel less good (don't conflate the meeting for the work), or making it harder to schedule a meeting.

I give at least 50/50 odds that I've forgotton one or more ways to address this problem, but it's an admirable start.

But I think when you look at these ideas, we're asking people to keep making the choice to make their day less enjoyable, or filled with a new barrier to doing something they think is useful.

When you put it that way, it's a lot more understandable why this pattern might be easy to enter but hard to leave.

To part of Ed's point, that I don't think he confronts, I also think it's easy to criticise the obviously bad actions of "executives" and "management" in another company, but much harder to negotiate the power structures in your own company.  Also, what if you _are_ management and things are working really well for you ?

I have a similar complaint of uppercase-A Agile in software development: where everyone claims to rely on it, but I think the majority of senior+ practitioners haven't read _one_ book about management.  I think a staggering minority of people have read books by at least two different authors.  Thousands of people in thousands of companies worldwide are doing things in the name of uppercase-A Agile and haven't engaged with what that means.

And we have condecension for management?

Anyway, look, down with meetings.  Long may our glorious meetingless revolution continue.  Or maybe, more moderately, let's not forget how much more satisfying it is to deliver value to real people through working software.  To make somebody's day 1% better, or to remove one instance of information duplication, or take somebody's time with our software seriously and not waste it.  At least half the teams I've worked with would see their total value delivered increase if they spent more time building, not more time _talking_ about value.  

I hope to keep at least some of this front-of-mind as the next meeting invite comes in.