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David Rodenas PhD

David Rodenas PhD⁠

Passionate software engineer & storyteller. Sharing knowledge to advance our skills. Join me on a journey of discovery in the world of software engineering.

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This Simulator Shows What Meetings Do to Developer Productivity — Hour by Hour

Adjust meeting times, types, and frequencies to see how different schedules preserve —or destroy— developer productivity.

14 min readJul 5, 2025

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«A meeting invite destroying the focus? Not again» — Generated by the author.

That 2 PM meeting just cost you 4 hours of productivity. Now you can see exactly why. This simulator lets you drag meetings around a weekly calendar and watch — in real-time — as developer focus crumbles and productivity plummets. The math behind Paul Graham’s “maker schedule” insight is clear: a one-hour meeting doesn’t cost one hour, it costs an entire afternoon. Now you can test every possible schedule — without disrupting your actual team — and create meeting schedules that actually work.

In the Freakonomics No Stupid Questions podcast, they asked If Everyone Hates Meetings, Why Do We Have So Many Of Them? Yet, the most relevant part that I found was what a Paul Graham excerpt in which he explains that while managers tend to cut the day into one-hour intervals, creative people, like “programmers and writers” they prefer to use time in units of half a day, at least. As he said:

“They [makers] generally prefer to use time in units of half a day, at least. You can’t write or program well in units…

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Passionate software engineer & storyteller. Sharing knowledge to advance our skills. Join me on a journey of discovery in the world of software engineering.