I Need More Than 10 Minutes Notice for a Pre-Hours Meeting

[canyonwalker]

My normal working hours start at 8am local time. From the perspective of accommodating others it's an eminently reasonable start time. It's not like I'm being a stereotypical engineer and drifting up to my desk sometime around 9:30am, maybe. (At my previous job my colleagues tended to arrive at the office just before 9:30am.)

Today a colleague wanted to meet with me at 7:30. My 8am start time is displayed on my calendar— so anyone who tries to book an earlier meeting sees a warning that I'm generally not available. I am willing to accommodate pre-hours meetings, though. But I need, among other things, reasonable notice. Today the person inviting me to the 7:30am meeting sent the invitation at... 7:19am. If you're asking me to start work early I need more than 10 minutes notice!

And by "more than 10" I don't mean 11!

Reach out to me during working hours the day before to confirm that the pre-hours meeting is okay.

Comments

[khedron]

Dude. For real. While I will get slack/etc. notifications on my phone before I start my work day, I will almost never be checking email or calendar. That's just not a thing.

[sorcyress]

One of my work's recent decisions was to switch/update/muck with our email client. Which fine whatever. But the side effect was that now, unless we are on the district LAN, we are required to use a smartphone to do 2FA to log into our email.

Work has not given me a smartphone to do 2FA (and I work in a public school, they would laugh me out of the building if I asked). So I'm taking this as full permission to no longer check my email outside of work hours, ever, because I literally can't.

Off-hours meetings? Absolutely not happening because I simply will not know about them. It's been freeing, in a "well this is super frustrating" sort of way.

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

That reminds me of what happened with one of my brothers-in-law, who is a county prosecutor. Some years ago the state decided "Case materials cannot be removed from county offices" or something like that. It seemed like it was a ham-fisted rule enacted in response to a situation where an attorney took files home or somewhere else and then lost control of them. The upshot was it put a sudden end to work outside of 9-5. There was no more "After dinner I need to spend an hour working on this brief." At 5pm all papers and computers get put in locked drawers at the office and left there until the start of the next workday.