One good thing that came out of our mandated quality training was that meetings would have two main characteristics: 1) they would always have a written agenda that was given to participants beforehand, and 2) no meeing would last more than one hour.

That set of rules forced everyone to prioritize and focus on the main issues at hand and not turn a meeting into a marathon. Obviously, more meetings would follow to finish up complex issues. But, the time between meetings allowed people to come up with ideas and solutions instead of being forced to come to a solution in the meeting that generally had no pre-existing agenda just to say an answer was agreed upon. And those types of free form meetings can usually end up where the person who has the most juice or talks the loudest gets his “solution” agreed upon by all who don’t think it’s the best.

Another killer are meetings. Certainly meetings are useful and needed at times, but I find that more than half of the meetings I’m forced to attend are worthless and unnecessary.

I think there is way too much emphasis placed on that methodology. That buzzword (multitasking) has been forcefit into everything even though it is NOT a methodology that should apply to every task. Many tasks done by many people are short focus tasks, whereas programming can easily become longer than even we anticipate as we dive in and get more than just our hands dirty.

But, if mediocity is the goal, by all means stay with multitasking in all you do.

Great thoughts in your posted article.