Calendar Crap

I am, by title, a "Senior [blah blah blah] Engineer." Which is pretty impressive to my mom, and might make you think that I drive a train, design hydroelectric power plants, work with calibrated instruments, or solve problems involving lots of numbers using a slide rule or abacus. But I do none of those things.

I attend meetings. And you know what? It isn't so bad. Most of them are conference calls these days, so I can keep my feet on my desk while I listen through my headset to the inane droning from the other end. That part is actually pretty cool.

The hard part, the part that takes up the bulk of my time and mental energy is figuring out when to "go" to a meeting, what meetings to "go" to, and what number to dial to attend. So I spend a lot of time in scheduling a meeting via email and then putting it on my calendar, and often enough forgetting about the meeting until 25 minutes after it started anyway. In most cases the meeting didn't require my presence, or eventually someone will call me to ask the specific question that the group who attended arrived at. In the end, my time has not only been saved to permit me to work on other things, my value as a senior engineer has been illustrated to those who waited on me.

Let me just say right here that I staunchly refuse to use Microsoft Outlook for reasons other than just its storied history of security vulnerabilities. For one thing, I don't want someone to send me an "invite" that automatically assigns my time. I don't care to expose my calendar to the rest of the company (what if sales blow-hards started attending my POWER meetings? shit!). I also can keep a straight face when I tell people that the bulk of my real work gets done when I am not in meetings, so staying out of meetings is an advantage to my productivity.

Still, I must keep a calendar so I can refer to it when someone asks me a question because the inevitable answer is that I will have a better answer for them after some other meeting which is happening later in the week. You want to know if the widget-counter contraption you've been asking me about for three months is complete yet? Yeah, let me get back to you after the engineering meeting Thursday afternoon. Of course, on Friday they are too busy thinking about light beer to remember to ask me about it again, so the cycle can continue for another week. I also need to keep a calendar so I know when to go get my haircut.

What I would hope for, presumably in order to be more efficient, is an easier to use calendar. A way to be automatically gently reminded of upcoming events, and just a little goddamn privacy. Look, efficiency is efficiency. If it could help me be more efficient with working, it will help me be more efficient with slacking.

A colleague has suggested using calendar.google.com but I know that using external websites to record sensitive company data is, well, frowned upon in an organization so large that they feel they must do everything themselves or not at all.

In the mean time, a frustratingly large proportion of the time that I'm in my chair, awake, sober, and not unabashedly wasting my time is spent coordinating my schedule instead of solving cool problems that make things work better, faster, cheaper. If you wonder what drives a person to become a slack-hacker, that's a big part of it.