Half of You in the Meeting and Half in the Editor

The call is running.

Your editor is open next to it.

You are, by your own account,
making good use of the hour.

Count what you got.

The code you wrote
is the code you rewrote afterwards,
because you were typing
in the gaps between sentences
and holding nothing in your head
for longer than nine seconds.

And the meeting went past you.

You have the shape of it.
Somebody was concerned about something.
There was a decision.

Next Tuesday you will ask
what was decided,
of a person who already said it,
while you were there.

That is the trade you made.

Two half attentions
that produced nothing,
paid for with a full hour,
and the whole time
it felt like efficiency,
because both halves were moving.

There is a second cost,
slower and worse.

The room learns where you are.

People stop directing questions
at the person who says what.
Then they stop waiting
for you to have an opinion.
Then the meeting happens
without needing you in it,
and eventually
without inviting you,
and you will experience that
as being left out of things.

You were not left out.

You left, gradually,
in small pieces,
while still attending.

So decide at the door.

Either close the other window
and be the person
who asks the question
that ends this twenty minutes early,
which is a real contribution
and takes attention to do,

or do not go.

Say you will read the notes.

If there are no notes,
that is the actual problem,
and it is worth one awkward request
to fix permanently.

If you cannot decline
and cannot afford to attend,
say that out loud
at the start.

I am half on this,
I will read it afterwards,
do not count my silence as agreement.

Everyone else in that call
is doing the same arithmetic
and pretending not to.

Pick one.

Being in two places
is being in neither,
and you pay for both.

– Serguey Asael Shinder