I'd like to hold Rubber Duck Hours (like Office Hours, but, well, ask me or do a search for "Rubber Ducking" if you haven't encountered that concept before) on some day of the week.
The idea here is that I'll offer to be an idea-bouncer -- for anything, even outside of my skill range; if you wanna talk about a thing, we'll do it! Even if all I can do is listen -- and we'll either try to brainstorm, or, just learn and share some information about what's on our minds.
There's a few special rules that make this different than a regular meeting at work:
- Talk about anything.
- I mean it, anything. I may be an engineer, but it doesn't have to be about engineering, and it certainly doesn't have to be code review.
- Agenda not necessary. In fact, agenda not even desired. Maybe pick one seed thought, and that's enough. Sometimes brains get somewhere interesting by wandering!
And there's a few things we're not going to use this time for, because that would be A Different Thing:
- You are not allowed to ask me to pre-read any materials. I know, it's tempting, but we both have to have skin in the game in the form of our hour together -- hosting RDH is not meant to be an open funnel for unlimited asks, and what I'm offering to do here is think together, not think for you.
- Correspondingly, any asks for follow up actions will be politely rejected. I'm offering to be a rubber duck and idea-bouncer; honor it best by taking it for what it is. Follow ups (or the choice not to, according to your priorities) on any ideas from our hour together are still yours to own.
- One person at a time. Meetings and Rubber Ducking are almost diametrically opposed concepts, and though both are useful, they are different things -- this time is something we're making for communication that is not meetings.
And a couple just practical things:
- about 1 hr is probably the amount of time to aim for. We can quit early, but should reserve that much time so as not to rush.
- please don't request a slot within half an hour of another slot -- biology is real and has limiting factors
- no recurring bookings. Make these with a reason. (Any reason -- even "I'm in the mood to chat with someone" -- but a reason.) There's no promise I'll be available or do RDH every week -- I probably won't! It's contingent on my mood too.
- Same-day drop in bookings are fine! I'm reserving the time as a block to make that easy for you to do. (but probably ping me on some low-latency messenger if you do this -- calendars don't always send good notifications.)
These rules are aimed to make it useful, but also still limited (and frankly, conserve my sanity^W^W^W time-box the effort -- this has to be a scalable thing for the host! Proportional investment, and so on)... and provide a different kind of space for communication than meetings or other structured time does. (It's a bit like "Donut Date" too; just a bit less randomized.)
If you want to try it out: there's a session on my calendar on {day_of_week} this week called "Rubber Duck Hours". Make a meeting anytime in that window. (Don't ask me -- just do it!) That's all there is to it!