> The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting
If I wanted to manage my calendar in the way you suggest using my current calendar system it seems like I would manually allocate a block of "prep time" every time someone invites me to a meeting with prerequisites, correct?
If prep time is publicly blocked out then we may have to manually negotiate a suitable time because no one knows which blocks are prep and which are meetings. Alternately if prep time is not publicly visible then anyone can schedule over it then people need to start rejecting meetings after all blocks are filled by meetings or prep. In both cases everyone has to manually reshuffle prep time and potentially manually negotiate schedules which sounds like a lot of work for every new meeting.
In reality everywhere I've worked assumes that "prep time" is something that everyone handles in their own way. In practice that means some people mange to squeeze it in during normal business hours, some people do it the night before during their personal time, some people (usually the most important stakeholders) come with an apology that they haven't gotten to the material yet.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if calendaring tools better supported this use case (e.g. "reserve 30m up to a week before this meeting") but until then blocking out time during a meeting for reading seems very civilized.
If I wanted to manage my calendar in the way you suggest using my current calendar system it seems like I would manually allocate a block of "prep time" every time someone invites me to a meeting with prerequisites, correct?
If prep time is publicly blocked out then we may have to manually negotiate a suitable time because no one knows which blocks are prep and which are meetings. Alternately if prep time is not publicly visible then anyone can schedule over it then people need to start rejecting meetings after all blocks are filled by meetings or prep. In both cases everyone has to manually reshuffle prep time and potentially manually negotiate schedules which sounds like a lot of work for every new meeting.
In reality everywhere I've worked assumes that "prep time" is something that everyone handles in their own way. In practice that means some people mange to squeeze it in during normal business hours, some people do it the night before during their personal time, some people (usually the most important stakeholders) come with an apology that they haven't gotten to the material yet.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if calendaring tools better supported this use case (e.g. "reserve 30m up to a week before this meeting") but until then blocking out time during a meeting for reading seems very civilized.