We all know the stereotype, a developer sat in a dark room, headphones on, ignoring the outside world. But there’s a reason for that.

Software development requires analysing, building and fixing complex pieces of code. Sometimes pieces of code that were written by a former colleague, 5 years ago, with no clear documentation. Every developer has seen this and worse.

We write and think in a language that isn’t our mother tongue, but we speak it and visualise the structure of the data and the screens a user might interact with.

What I’m saying is, software development is not easy. Even if it does come naturally to some people.

Why am I writing this blog? Since COVID and the lockdowns on 2020 through to 2021, I’ve seen a creeping meeting culture across the industry. Meeting about a release process. Meeting about standards. Meeting about planning. Meeting about a meeting. Planning everything into the most minute detail rather than “getting on with it”.

The list goes on.

Yes, sometimes a meeting is required. But, sometimes, the meeting could be a Slack message or a quick call.

Developers need time to focus on their tasks, get into the work and build the user story.

A simple 30-minute meeting, can be upwards of 1 hours disruption to a developer. That’s because we need time to prepare for the meeting, then we need time to get focussed again and find where we got up to and then start again.

In a world where; story points are monitored, velocity analysed and efficiencies continually being looked for, maybe we can start with reducing the amount of meetings that an entire development team need to attend.

Meeting free days, let every developer of every level “lock in” and make meaningful progress on their stories and tasks.