The Codecruncher

… and more work.

37 signals, the people guilty for the most talked about framework in recent history, Ruby on Rails, have published an online PDF book that sells itself. Or at least with me , judging by the sample chapters online, they have scored: a book containing a chapter called Meetings are toxic can’t be a bad reading. Some wisdom:

There’s nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting. Here’s a few reasons why:

They break your work day into small, incoherent pieces that disrupt your natural workflow

They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or some interface design)

They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute

They often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense

They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in heavy snow

They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what they are about

They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway

I, having lost many, many, really many productivity hours in my current project because of meetings, couldn’t agree more with all of that. Above all when you have the bad luck of getting as a project manager a utter (über)incompetent, a guy who couldn’t find his own ass with his own two hands, a flaslight and a map. A guy who is completely unable to improvise, to adapt: the guy prepares his scripts for the meetings and whenever the meeting deviates itself from the expected planning the guy is more lost than Kunta Kinte at a Merle Haggard concert. You have to either baby-walk him back to the point, or bend the meeting to conformity with his script. And that last option is not the really complicated step, the worst comes when the guy weants to bend reality because it doesn’t conform to plan. And reality tends to be difficult to bend.

But I digress… about the book, you have some more samples on its web, Getting Real, which is the book’s title. Just for $19, I think I’m going to download it this very afternoon and at least laugh a while… or get green with envy seeing how in other places they do things.