I find little timers like this crazy effective. When I switched to freelancing fulltime, I built a little Gmail widget to help keep me motivated.
It shows my bank account balance, in real time, ticking down to zero based on my monthly budget's burn rate. There is something uniquely motivating about seeing your money slowly disappear as you check your email.
It's dirt simple - I actually converted a "world population" widget into what I wanted, hence some of the funny names. "Startpop" is your starting bank account. "Poprate" is your burn rate per second. "Startdatepop" is the day you start the counter.
For example, in my script I budgeted $1000/month, which works out to $0.00038/s
Like I said, it's pretty crude. You have to routinely update both your balance and the start-date to keep it accurate...but I've found just the idea of a ticking balance is more powerful than what the number actually is.
Not all meetings are bad though and you cannot put a counter on meetings that foster future growth or stability. Spending 30mins extra in a meeting could resolve a major issue, helping the company beat competition - something that you cannot put a dollar value on easily.
Just like there is an opportunity cost of having four senior staff sit in a room for 45mins, there is an opportunity (benefit) for them to do something that helps the long-term growth too. While I have been in many meetings that were twice as long as they needed to be, I have also been in meetings that went overtime but solved technical, inter-departmental, and operational problems. Having a clock in those meetings would have been seriously counter-productive.
Agreed - but I think there are enough unbalanced forces within most organizations towards the "let's a have meeting" solution to problems that this is making a "ha, ha, only serious" point that resonates.
This reminds me of the 5 years-with-the-company speech I gave in front of a large audience in a meeting that I thought had been going too long.
Before the speech, I calculated how many 15-second intervals I had been with the company (approximately of course). So when it came time to give my speech, I asked everyone to look at their watch for 15 seconds, noted that it felt like a long time, then stated how many times that we were in the meeting and tied it up with humor pointing out how much times that I had been with the company.
Laughs all around, but everyone got the joke that I was pointing out about the meeting itself being long.
If you click through and submit a meeting, you're rewarded with some clever artwork making fun of the hot websites of the day (Facebook, Foursquare, etc.).
This may be useful if you pay people by the hour, but in most companies with fixed employees you just keep people on the payroll to make sure they are available when you need it. Meeting costs become relevant when you have an excess of work vs your capacity - then meetings go in the way of doing other valuable things.
Not at all. It's a meeting of four people, each of them making ~$75k, which is about half of what a skilled and experienced programmer (HN audience?) commands these days.
You have to remember the employer's overhead, as well - things like office space, computers, electricity, health insurance contributions, etc etc etc.
When you start talking about the HN crowd, it's a lunch meeting of two people in the lobby of a pretty normal office.
Not really if you're considering billable rates. A senior designer or a junior engineer could easily bill for $200. And remember, its an average. Get a principal or an architect in the room and you've got some people who might bill at, I don't know, $700 dollars an hour or more.
That might not be the company's cost, but it will show you how much of a client's budget you're burning through in a meeting.
It shows my bank account balance, in real time, ticking down to zero based on my monthly budget's burn rate. There is something uniquely motivating about seeing your money slowly disappear as you check your email.