Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

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A case study: Why “meeting for meeting’s sake” is bad

Monday, February 1st, 2010

source: mitopencourseware / flickr

We all know meetings are bad (if you don’t, then you’re in the wrong place). But “meeting for meeting’s sake”, a repeating meeting that occurs regardless of an agenda or need, is not only really bad, but potentially destructive.

This is the story of one such meeting. The meeting was a monthly meeting with only a vague description. This instance of the meeting had no agenda until just 30 minutes prior to the meeting’s start. Nobody came prepared, nor did anybody know what to expect. On top of that, important participants were missing, as they were in another meeting.

In my mind, this was a meeting that had every reason to be postponed, if not completely canceled. Unfortunately, the decision was made to hold the meeting anyway.

The topic was controversial. Being that there was only a 30 minute lead time on what the meeting was going to be about, those opposed to the topic had absolutely no time to formulate a response and alternative solution. Those in favor had no idea of the opposition they were about to face.

The conference room was a tinderbox; emotions got heated very quickly. Those opposed reacted from pure gut instinct because they did not have solid facts to work with and had to reach for arguments against. Those in favor reacted emotionally, also due to the lack of preparation, as they were unaware of the hastily arranged, albeit unintentional, ambush awaiting them.

The meeting ended slightly prematurely, with all sides leaving angry. This meeting did more damage than anything else.

What should have happened? There were two major, if not fatal, mistakes made. First, the meeting should have never occurred because there were people who needed to be there who were double-scheduled, and had to go to another meeting. Those people had important information that could have made the meeting go smoother. Secondly, there should have been an agenda for the meeting published several days ahead of time. This would have allowed the opposition to come up with fact-based arguments and an alternative solution, as well as given the proponents time to realize there was an opposition, and to make preparations for that.

When you find yourself scheduled to attend a ‘meeting for meeting’s sake’, don’t just think that you’ll be wasting time. You could be damaging workplace relationships and putting your projects in peril.

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Eureka! The maker vs. the manager

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Sometimes I’ll just be sitting there minding my own business, when all of the sudden, WHAM! — something comes along that’s so obvious that it results in a “Eureka!” moment (it’s happened twice in the last couple of weeks, so expect another post just like this soon). This time the WHAM came while crawling through my RSS reader, when I found a blog post titled “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“.

If you’ve read very far on this site, you’ll know I despise meetings. Horribly. I view meetings as a productivity sink; there’s no way I can be more productive in a meeting, and, many times, I am completely unproductive in a meeting.  I would hear people talking about their day being fully booked — and are excited about it! I couldn’t grasp why someone would be excited about it. These same people believe there isn’t a single problem a meeting can’t solve, when, in my mind, meetings only create problems.  Why are my observations about meetings so disjointed with these other people.  Is there something wrong with me? With them?  The answer is “neither.”

The “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” eureka! moment made me realize that there are two distinctly different types of people when it comes to meetings.  Worse, neither side understands the other. Nor do they try.

In order for makers to help managers understand, we must communicate with them. We must let them know how a single meeting could potentially ruin an entire day. Hopefully you can find a manager that has, hopefully recently, been a maker. They will become your champion. Remind them of the joy of a meeting-less day and how much they were able to get done, and that satisfaction that provided.

You’re not going to be able to get out of all meetings, unfortunately.  There are two things that can be done to assist in your goal of unfettered making time: 1) Minimize your meetings, and 2) Coalesce your meetings.

Minimize your meetings

Minimize both the number and length of meetings. Ask if you really need to be in the meeting, and explain the benefits of what you’ll be able to accomplish if you don’t attend. Do not fall into the trap of the default hour meeting time. Challenge the meeting organizer to reduce a meeting down to 30 minutes, or to 45 if that doesn’t work. Just because your meeting software defaults to hour-long meetings doesn’t mean you have to follow their cue.

Coalesce your meetings

Think of your calendar as a hard disk defragger display. Get the meetings to all form consecutive blocks such that you don’t have an hour meeting, an hour break, and then another hour of meeting.  That hour break in the Calendar. Source: library_chic / flickrmiddle is useless because you’re not going to be able to really get up to speed before you need to start slowing down for the next meeting. Hopefully you can coalesce all your meetings together in the morning, so you’ll have a wide-open afternoon to work. (Or maybe that’s just me; I wouldn’t like my prospects for the day if I knew my entire afternoon was filled with meetings.)

Move meetings to natural boundaries, such as the hour before or after lunch. If I know there’s a meeting scheduled at 2, I’ll postpone my lunch until 1:15 or so. Don’t allow a meeting to fall right in the middle of your morning or afternoon. However, do not try to create a designated “meeting zone” during the day. Some managers will think all available time within that block of time will need to be filled with meetings. Instead, create a “do not meet” time in which meetings cannot be scheduled, allowing the makers to make and the managers to plan their next batch of  meetings.

Understanding the manager mindset

Managers usually schedule meetings to get information of one type or another. Here are a few quick ideas to provide information without having a meeting, to shorten meetings, or to get uninvited to meetings.

Suggest an alternative to a meeting. For example, if you’re asked if you’re going to be free for a meeting, respond by asking to talk about it now. Without the formality of the meeting, and the inclusion of  unnecessary people (who tend to elongate the meeting), you’ll spend less time addressing the issue.

Try a preemptive strike. If you’re scheduled for a meeting, and you see only one issue for you during the meeting (you only attend meetings with an agenda, right?), go directly to the meeting owner’s office/cube, and give them the information they need, then excuse yourself from the meeting. Follow up with an email to all the invitees.

Do not attend a meeting without an agenda. As mentioned above, you should never go to a meeting that doesn’t have a published agenda. Without it, how do you know when you’ve answered the organizer’s questions, or fulfilled their need to know? By balking at attending an agenda-less meeting, you’re actually helping the manager get in the habit of creating agendas, which will be a win for everyone.  Once you have the agenda, become an agenda hawk. If conversation goes off topic, bring attention to it and get the meeting back on course, even if it’s not your meeting.

If all else fails, become a pain in the ass. If you’re continually getting invites to unproductive meetings from a single individual, it might become necessary to go negative. Start coming up with action items for the manager, forcing them to look through the eyes of a maker for a bit. Go medieval on the meeting’s ass by being a stickler for starting and ending times, and for sticking to the agenda (see above).

Hopefully with these ideas, your meetings will become less frequent, and those you still have will be less of a waste of time.

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Availability-based meeting anti-patterns

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

3350030807_2e7e0d0935_mIn a prior post, I discussed three meeting “anti-patterns” regarding the use of laptops during meetings. Here, I discuss two availability-based meeting anti-patterns.

There aren’t any conference rooms available

Have you ever tried to have a quick chat with a few people, but ended up talking in a hallway because all the conference rooms were full?  Well, then you’ve experienced the There Aren’t Any Conference Rooms Available pattern. Being a conscientious co-worker, you know that having a discussion with two or three other people in your cube can be distracting to those around you, so when such conversations arise, you go looking for a conference room.  But they’re all full. You then start making a second round, trying to find a meeting that’s about to wrap up.  It’s then you notice that one of the rooms is occupied by two folks, each of whom have their own offices.  With real walls, doors, and everything. Then you find another room with a team — and it looks like they’re having a good time! They obviously can’t be having a serious meeting. That’s because they’re not; they reserved the room for an hour, and it only took 15 minutes to finish up their business, so they’re going to stay in the room because it’s theirs! It’s the principle, after all.

Both of those scenarios are true (I was the one looking for an open room).  There are a few things that a company can do to avoid this type of problem.  First, make sure there’s a small room available that cannot be scheduled that is used only for short, impromptu meetings.  Also make sure that there’s a whiteboard in the room for brainstorming.  Next, make sure that people with offices (executives and managers, typically) use their offices in lieu of taking up a conference room (leaving the rooms for people who do real work ;) ). Lastly, institute a policy that discourages keeping a meeting going until all time has expired; if you finish all the agenda items, close the meeting and leave the room.

The Next Time We’re All Available To Meet Is In Two Weeks

Now, another ripped from the headlines all too true story: You have a bona fide need for a meeting.  You fire up your meeting scheduler, set the appropriate meeting length, create the most beautiful meeting agenda known to mankind, and the click the “auto schedule” button, and your jaw drops at the result.  You’ve just encountered the Next Time We’re All Available To Meet Is In Two Weeks pattern.  There are a few possible causes for this.  One is that your company has too many meetings. There should be no better way to demonstrate this to your executive management than by showing them the schedules of those you need in your meeting, and explaining to them that your critical meeting (it is critical, right? Otherwise you don’t really need a meeting) is being delayed by two weeks because of the excess of meetings.  Be prepared to show examples of meetings with dubious need, such as hour-long status meetings.

Another reason is that some of the people on your invite list, in an attempt to ensure they get things done, are blocking out chunks of time on their calendars to avoid meetings. (Full disclosure: I do this every so often, even though I know I shouldn’t.)  The reason for this is the same: your company has too many meetings of a dubious nature.  If meetings were less frequent, and the meetings that were held actually provided value, people wouldn’t need to block out their calendar to get things done.

Something you can do to avoid this altogether is to ensure you’re inviting the absolute minimum number of people required to have a successful meeting.  Are you really sure that inviting someone with a full calendar is adding value to your meeting?  Remember, there is more to a meeting than just sitting in a room and talking. There is preparation, and time required to act upon items assigned during the meeting; if someone’s calendar is always full, they will not have the requisite time to do either. Aside from lowering the chances of a scheduling collision, inviting the bare minimum should be considered as “the right thing to do” simply because you will not be wasting other people’s time by including them in a meeting in which they will have little to no input.

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Meetings, laptops, delays and embarassment

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
A laptoppy meeting

A laptoppy meeting

I hate meetings. They suck productivity, cause interruptions that further suck your productivity, and generally do not accomplish much.  However, I do recognize the necessary evil of getting everyone in the same place at the same time to ensure we all know what needs to be done.  All I ask is that they be as short as possible. Here are three meeting “anti-patterns” to avoid:

A scenario that I used to encounter often was the “I Didn’t Take Setup Time Into Consideration” pattern. This usually occurs in smaller organizations with limited conference rooms that end up being scheduled wall-to-wall all day long. The presenter, unable to gain access to the conference room before the meeting started (or worse, was a part of the previous meeting), proceeded to project a defect tracking system onto the wall to review open defects.  As the attendees gathered, we just sat there, waiting for the laptop to boot, then for the projector to get set up properly, and then the presenter finding the correct report to run. During the five to ten minutes it took to do that, the attendees weren’t doing anything other that wasting time and losing (the company’s) money. Always ensure there is sufficient lead time to set up for your meetings.  In the event that your conference rooms are always booked, schedule the meeting to start at ten minutes after the hour. Don’t just waste people’s time.

A related pattern is the “I Want To Use Software I’ve Never Used Before To Present At The Meeting.” It is very similar to the pattern described above, except that it continues the full length of the meeting.  Don’t use meeting time to figure out how software works. Consider it a part of your preparation for the meeting.  Do a few trial runs even before scheduling the meeting.

And then there’s the “Everybody Now Knows How Much Of A Raise Joe Got Because I Left My Email App Open” pattern. When you attend a meeting, and must bring the laptop to project information to everyone, remember to turn off your email client, including any notification tools that you may have.  Failing to do so could result in sensitive information being displayed to the entire meeting.  This becomes even more serious if you’re a manager or an executive level employee. I’ve actually witnessed emails regarding benefit packages and vacation requests projected on the wall during a meeting.

All three of these patterns have a common thread: the laptop. When meeting, ask if you really need the laptop. I’m a fan of the topless meeting, and feel as if I’ve been liberated during meetings.  I can now pay attention to the person talking instead of futzing with the laptop, plus I no longer have to worry about others asking me to look things up.  Ask yourself what projecting from a laptop buys you that a well written agenda on a whiteboard or easel pad wouldn’t.  Most of the time, but certainly not all the time, you’ll find the answer is “nothing.”

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Gartner tells network administrators to “Release the Hounds”

Monday, October 19th, 2009

CNET reports that Gartner execs have told the crowd attending Gartner Symposium that it’s time to relax the network restrictions a bit:

[Gartner analysts] argu[ed] that corporate computing departments shouldn’t block social networking and that security shouldn’t completely lock down communications with the outside world. And even if information technology authorities want to shut down such activity, they can’t.

That is quite a change from IT “lock it all down” policies that I’ve seen spiraling out of control.  In my mind, it would be a welcome change. Lockdowns of corporate networks have gone past the point of annoyance into the realm of complete productivity busting. Over the last year, I’ve encountered being blocked from reading essential information regarding Linux system administration (reason: bikinis and/or lingerie. Seriously.) to being locked out of my corporate network entirely due to a password change that didn’t propagate to my maven settings (lost time: roughly four hours).

What’s amusing is, as the article says, blocking is futile.  I was able to get to the blocked Linux forum by using my iPhone.  I can do the same with social networking services.  Ditto instant messaging services that are also actively blocked. The only drawback is that is takes a bit longer.

I’ll just have to wait and see if this takes hold in the corporate world.

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Why I hate proxy servers

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

“Hate” is a strong word. It’s also a massively overused word. I avoid the use of “hate”, reserving it for the most heinous of nouns.  One such noun is “authenticating proxy server.”  Fortunately, for most of my career, I’ve managed to avoid workplaces in which these roadblocks to the Internet are used.  That is, until my current job.

A brick wall

A brick wall

There was an issue that arose recently that perfectly exemplifies why I hate the proxy server. Somehow, probably through the proxy server itself, I managed to have my account locked out.  While I remained logged in to my workstation, I could not access any resources outside the proxy server. The application I was using apparently needed access to the Internet to phone home (perhaps validating registration or checking for updates), and because my account had been locked, I couldn’t get through the proxy server. When the application couldn’t complete the call home, it decided to crash. Net result: I lost about 30 minutes worth of work.  All because the proxy server was there ensuring that I didn’t go to nasty porn sites.

A similar issue occurs with some development tools, namely Maven.  During a build, Maven checks public repositories for updated libraries used in the project.  If you do not have proxy settings just right, Maven cannot access those repositories, and the build will fail.  Again, all for a little perceived extra security.

The rules in place for the proxy server to block a site appears to be completely random.  On several occasions, I’ve Googled something I was researching, and find the golden nugget of information I needed, only to have the site blocked because it had been tagged as “a BLOG”. OH MY GOD NO, NOT A BLOG! Fortunately, I was able to get around that problem by either looking at Google’s cached version of the page, or using a mobile broadband modem to view the actual site, but either solution meant that I wasted time.

The time lost due to data loss, build problems and blocked research is significant. This happens at least twice a month, and there have been days where this has happened twice or more.  Each “outage” costs me at least a half hour, more when you consider the “in the zone” time that’s lost.

My takeaway from this is that there is less concern about getting things done than there is about blocking questionable content from the Internet.

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The “It’ll take just a minute” myth

Monday, September 21st, 2009

clock.jpgHave you ever been at work when somebody approaches you asking for “a minute of your time”? I’m sure we all have. The problem is that the damage done by that interruption is much more than just time consumed by the interruption.

This isn’t just about the interruption taking a minute —because rarely is that true— but it’s about the time it takes for you and your brain to recover and get back into the mindset you were in prior to the interruption. A study printed in the New York Times that used Microsoft employees as a sample set showed that it took, on average, an employee 15 minutes to recover from even the most trivial of interruptions, such as an email notification.

I have known this for quite a while from my own experience, but I believe that the estimate might be a bit on the conservative side. The reason for this is that an interruption, regardless of its length or importance, destroys your concentration. The people in this study weren’t just folks off the street, but were the well trained and intelligent folks at Microsoft, so I believe the recovery time could very well be longer for most people. Additionally, I would think that the difficultly of the work in progress has an impact upon the recovery time as well, and would not be surprised that it could take as long as 30 minutes to recover from an interruption to a difficult task.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say the person approaching you for a minute of your time really does need only a minute, and the recovery time for an interruption is 15 minutes. The total cost of that interruption to you, in terms of productivity, would be around 16 minutes, and possibly longer depending upon the difficulty of the interrupted task.

Mark McGuiness describes the reasoning behind this as a memory retention issue. Your memory is dependent upon your mind’s state; when your focus changes, as what happens when being interrupted, your mind’s state changes, and you lose a bit of the memory of the task you were working on prior to the interruption. The example he gives is one in which we’ve all participated: being interrupted in a conversation, then, post-interruption, on person asks the other “what were we talking about?”

Now, what to do about this? Banish all interruptions? Do that, and business as we know it would collapse (yes, even more than it’s already collapsed this year). Most interruptions are necessary, and the people doing the interrupting usually aren’t doing so to break other people’s concentration. There are questions to be asked and answered, but there are some interruptions that just must be told “no.” So the answer to what to do about this is something I’ll be writing about over the next couple weeks, using three different scenarios. Next will be a topic near and dear to my heart, meetings, and in specific that most evil villain the “Status Meeting”. Following that, I’ll have entries for breaks, and how to take them, and then interruptions in general.

Photo by: TW Collins

References:

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High productivity

Monday, September 21st, 2009

success.pngI just finished one of the the most productive weeks I’ve had in a long, long time. Rarely did I transfer over an unfinished task from the previous day. Monday and Thursday dragged a bit, more so Thursday, but the week as a whole rocked! Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to enjoy those types of weeks very often at my current employer, which in the past has prompted me to review what it was that happened that sucked my productivity during those typical workweeks. This time, I’m going to look at what I’ve done differently this week, and see if I can apply that to the future.

So what did I do differently this week? Here’s a list:

1. Mind mapping

I first came across the term ‘mind mapping’ when I bought SmartDraw a few years ago. I looked at the templates provided, and didn’t understand how they added any value. They looked too involved and thought they would take too long to create. It wasn’t until I read about them recently in “Getting Things Done” that I finally got it: it’s nothing more than an outline of thoughts. Instead of drawing them by hand (as shown in GTD) or in SmartDraw, I created an outline using Microsoft Word (an aside to OpenOffice and Google Docs: outline views are really nice, and missing from your products). I created an outline of things that needed my attention in the short term, and then continued breaking those things down until they reached a task so small that it could not be broken down any further. As I did this to other tasks, I’d realized I’d forgotten a step in a previous task, and then added it. When I was done, I had a full list of things that were easy to do in one sitting, and had a clear map of what needed to be done for the rest of the week.

2. Conspicuous lack of meetings

My current employer is crazy with meetings. I’ve worked at much larger (in one notable case, thousands of times larger) companies that did not require as many meetings as I do now. What’s troubling is that it’s not unusual for the same meeting to occur multiple times because people left without forming a consensus on what the meeting’s resolution was. Discussing something over a cubicle wall doesn’t suffice; there needs to be a meeting. Having someone in charge make a decision doesn’t suffice; there must be a “debate”. This last week was almost meeting free, with the exception of the aforementioned Thursday. The lack of productivity on Thursday, in my mind, is directly related to the meetings, and when they took place. I’ll have more about this in a later post on the evils of meetings.

3. Lack of players

Due to vacations and two recent staff reductions, the number of people involved in the project was much smaller last week than normal; the fewer people, the less chance for things to go wrong, interruptions to occur, and meetings to go longer than needed. There were very few interruptions, and, as far as I could tell, there were no “emergencies” or unnecessary “drama” to suck productivity.

4. I still IM’d and Tweeted

I did not go full-blown isolationist in order to get things done. I kept my IM client open almost all week, and I continued to use Twitter and check my email on a normal basis (check it during natural breaks in work). The thought that IM/Twitter are productivity sinks is not necessarily true.

5. I worked normal hours

I never worked more than 9 hours in any given day (a couple of the 9 hour days were to make up for a doctor appointment early in the week); a little more than 40 hours for the week. I arrived fresh, and left before feeling overwhelmed. I can’t really distinguish this as one of the reasons for the jump in productivity, but I’ve always felt that forcing yourself to work long hours is not a productivity win, and is actually harmful in the long run. This is not a new trend; I’ve been working “normal” hours for the last few months due to health and family concerns, so while I feel it’s good for productivity in the long run, it didn’t play that big a role in the gains of the last week.

Takeaways

I’m going to continue the mind maps and the task deconstruction, and stay with the text-based outline format. Trying to create graphics or use specialized tools for that is going overboard, which is out of character, since I’m normally a very graphic-oriented person. I’ve always tried to keep a detailed task list, but breaking everything down with a mind map prior to starting seems to have helped. It also helped that the company’s goals didn’t change during the week, which allowed me to follow the map I’d created on Monday. It is not unusual to start Monday with one company vision, and have an entirely different vision by end-of-day Friday.

Meetings destroy productivity. The problem is that I’ve known that for quite some time, but have not had any success in trying to persuade management of that. My concern is that meetings and emergencies/dramas from others are well out of my control. Things will return to normal this coming week, so I’ll keep my eye on this troublemaker.

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Blank your web browser to avoid distractions

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

DistractedHave you ever had something urgent to do, fire up your web browser, then get totally sidetracked by something on your browser’s default home page? I do. Or, I should say, I did, and quite often.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had some sort of news portal as my start page. Back in the day, it was a Yahoo! page, and more recently it was a Google page personalized with several news and RSS feeds. It didn’t contain “fluff” like comics or a joke of the day; instead, it was local news headlines, finance stuff and a few tech RSS feeds. But often, too often, I would see a tantalizing headline or link that would divert my attention from the task at hand.

The worst type of distraction would be when I had a really good idea about how to fix a nagging defect or a way to make a page’s layout flow easier, only to forget what it was after getting five minutes deep into the latest breaking news story. Not only did I lose the five minutes I spent reading the story, I lost the incalculable amount of time it took to remember what it was I was thinking of earlier.

Then one day, just after a Firefox upgrade, it dawned on me: Get rid of the start page. After Firefox is updated, it shows a splash screen telling you about the update. Your normal start page is opened in another tab, but it was hidden by the splash. Since I wasn’t bombarded by Google’s personalized start page, I had no opportunity to lose focus. The answer was clear: don’t use Google’s personalized start page.

I then started thinking of a “proper” start page. Perhaps the home page for my site? No, a single out-of-place pixel would eventually start screaming at me to fix it, causing the same problems as the Google start page. I started thinking about posting a blank page to my site, and point to that, but that triggered something from my memory. Blank.

Both Firefox and IE have a special page called ‘about:blank’ that displays, as you might have guessed, a blank page. I set my home page to be about:blank, and now I’m greeted by a blank page that has no content whatsoever to steal my time. It doesn’t even hit a server.

The fact that about:blank doesn’t hit a server reveals a pleasant side-effect: starting the browser is now quicker. Granted, it’s not showing anything, and to get to where I want to go I have to select a bookmark, do a search or enter something in the address bar, which takes a bit more time. But it’s the page I want to see, and without distraction.

To set Firefox to open with a blank page, go to the Tools menu and select “Options…”. If it’s not already selected, click on the “Main” icon. In the dropdown labeled “When Firefox Starts”, select “Show a blank page”. Doing this allows you still set a certain page as your home page, allowing quick access by hitting Alt+Home.

The instructions are similar for IE. Select “Internet Options” from the Tools menu (or from the Control Panel), and click the ‘Use Blank’ button.


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Topless meetings: an update

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

As written here, I’m experimenting with laptop.jpggoing laptop-less during meetings. I believe I’m seeing the benefit to doing this, and I’m also being reminded about how distracting a laptop can be in a meeting. But first, let’s start with the benefits.

In my prior entry, I mentioned a concern about writing notes taking longer than typing them during the meeting, and then additional lost time transcribing the notes later. Fortunately, my concerns about these issues are waning. It’s not that the statements aren’t true: I can certainly type faster than I can write, and I do spend more time transcribing the notes after the meeting. But there is a huge upside to this: By typing the notes, I’m forcing myself to go over the meeting topics for a second time, expanding my comprehension of the meeting discussions (see “How I use my notebook”).

I’ve also found that there are ways to assist in speeding up notetaking by bringing pre-printed material to make notes on. Examples include an agenda, or a list of defects that need to be reviewed. Instead of writing down the agenda item, all you need to do is write the resolution and action items. A similar set of steps can be used for assigning and prioritizing defect lists.

Now that I’m laptop free, I’ve noticed issues with using a laptop and a projector and capturing notes. The “bug review” meeting is an example of the type of meeting where I notice this the most. There are two ways to run this meeting: Distribute the bugs (actually, I prefer the more direct term “defects”) on paper, and have people read of their own copy, or use a laptop connected to the issue tracking system and project the screen onto the wall, and have people read from the projected image. It seems to be much easier to use pre-printed materials and a pen or pencil than to have everyone starting at the projected image. There’s no real evidence to this, it just seems slower.

The action that makes it seem slower is when the defect is updated, it causes everyone else in the meeting to stop while the laptop user types the updated information into the system and waits for the change to be applied. This is not just a massive productivity drain, but instead it extends the time of the meeting, just the opposite of the argument for bringing laptops into the meeting.

Don’t use meeting time to figure out how software works. If you’re bringing a laptop with new software, take some time beforehand to ensure you know how to use it, otherwise, you’re just wasting the time of others in the meeting. If you must bring a laptop, ensure that all the applications, files, presentations, etc., are running and open prior to entering the meeting room. A classic example of this is the online screen-sharing applications like WebEx or GoToMeeting; in such a case, ensure you have the meeting room booked at least 15 minutes before the actual meeting starts, and then use that 15 minutes to connect and start the sharing process; don’t wait until the meeting start time to set up the session.

I’ll end with a warning regarding security and sensitive data risks for bringing laptops to meetings. When you attend a meeting, and must bring the laptop to project information onto a screen, ensure you turn off your email client, including any notification tools that you may have. Failing to do so could result in sensitive information being displayed to the entire meeting. This becomes even more serious if you’re a manager or an executive level employee.

I’ll follow up in a month or so, and see if I remain happy sans laptop…

Image: r8r

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