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Freaky Meetings

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Last Fall, before one of my workouts, I queued a podcast episode from Freakonomics titled How to make Meetings Less Terrible. I was a bit skeptical about this one because I’ve read dozens of articles about meetings and what else is there to say? But the Freakonomics staff is good at producing engaging and informative content and I needed something to get me through 6 miles.

How we spend our time…

In the interview, Steven Rogelberg says most professionals attend approximately 15 meetings a week. I almost stopped running to replay-it to make sure I heard it right because I knew I was well above 15 meetings a week. That’s 3 meetings a day and now I wonder why we aren’t talking more about a scheduling capacity for workers at 60% of the work week.  I confirmed I’m sitting north of the average as I attended 43 meetings last week and it was a typical week. 

Rogelberg also commented on the average length of a meeting,

“Magically, the average length across the world is one hour. And there’s just no reason for that. This is a modern phenomenon that has emerged due to calendaring programs like Outlook and Google Calendar.” 

Steven Rogelberg

I should note, after reading this I went and updated a few of my recurring meetings to 30 minutes and have since maintained diligence to start and end on-time. Others in my organization are following this rule of thumb as well. Of my 43 meetings last week, 35 of them were scheduled for 30 minutes. (Which is a little over 60% of the standard business hour work week!)

In my experience, the number of weekly meetings I attend has grown over the years. Certainly, this is somewhat related to moving into managerial positions.  But I believe much of the increase is related to two factors in the modern workplace:

1. Geographic separation of teams – with many project team members connected by technology, there is an increased need to have face-to-face time for collaboration and discussion. 

2. Decentralization of decision-making ownership – modern workers are taught and encouraged to gather input and make decisions by consensus. This translates into more in-person meetings. 

Back to the podcast. One of the ideas discussed was how to reduce the number of people at meetings and only invite those who need to be involved. Rogelberg advises,

“So when you are thinking about your agenda, consider framing it not as topics to be discussed, but consider framing it as questions to be answered. By framing it as questions to be answered it’s easier to determine who needs to be there because they’re relevant to the questions.” 

Steven Rogelberg

The emphasis is on the meeting organizer to plan better and only ask team members there that will participate in answering the open questions. That’s an interesting suggestion, because most meetings I attend, including those I organize, have meeting agendas with a bullet list of objectives or topics. 

Let’s call these two pieces of meeting wisdom ‘Freaky Meetings’ to build from Freakonomics but to also show they counter modern meeting behavior. Will you try it with me? Go shorten some of your meeting durations and adjust the agenda into a set of questions to be answered. 

Look at your calendar last week. Comment in this post with the number of meetings you attended. Let’s see how we stack-up to the average. 

Onward and upward.

Photo credit: Lucas Serazzi via Creative Commons https://flic.kr/p/xMSSBm

Video Conferencing – Why so serious?

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Just what is normal?

A typical business meeting goes something like this. There are a few people in a room together. A few more participants join remotely from their desk or home office. Screen-share is often used by the meeting organizer who may also pass control to another participant. But video, while available with most screen share programs, is used by only a few participants. 

My unscientific poll

I asked a few colleagues what holds them back from using video more and received some telling answers:

  • They didn’t have their camera positioned in front of them in their office setup
  • They didn’t want others to see what their office spaced looked like
  • They didn’t want others to see if they were multi-tasking
  • They didn’t want others to see what they were wearing (or not wearing)
  • They didn’t like looking at themselves on camera

In all the answers I received there was no mention of technology or bandwidth as a limiting factor. This would appear to be good news for makers of collaboration software as they wrestle with achieving more adoption of video and VOIP for meetings over traditional land-line calls. The last hurdle appears to be the participants’ office setup, self-consciousness, and privacy. Widespread video use in conferencing may be trickier than thought. 

My pitch for the road less traveled

I work remote from most of my direct team and I view video conferencing as a way to make the distance feel smaller.

Does it keep me more focused on the content of the meeting and less likely to multi-task? Yes and no. There have been times where the camera has helped me avoid the temptation to multi-task. Other times, I have wandered and decided it was OK if others could tell I was looking at something different on the screen. I’ll take the camera over the alternative because it allows me to add more to my communication through facial expressions and hand gestures.  

At the end of the day, I use video with my colleagues because I want the office to feel more intimate and real. Seeing my colleagues adds to the comradery of the group. It’s not for everyone, but maybe it will become part of our local culture. Vamos. 

Onward and upward!

Practical speak for staying focused in the office

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My greatest weakness?

Focus and attention are aspects of my life that I think about each day as I try navigate through tasks and interactions with others. By nature, I’m a very task-driven and goal oriented person. I told my wife just this week that while this can be one of my strengths, it’s also my greatest weakness. I’m so caught-up in thinking about the next task to be completed that I’m often not able to pause and enjoy the success and moment of the now. During a typical work day I can struggle to remain focused on any one task because so many people and devices are competing for my attention.

I’m not alone.

There’s a daily war for our attention from other people, computing devices, marketing ads, etc. I was recently reminded of it in my own family through a couple of events. During a recent movie night at home, each family member showed up to watch the movie with a personal electronic device (phone, tablet, laptop). Apparently spending two hours watching a single screen was difficult.

In another event, when we returned from a week-long vacation without cell phones, no one spoke for hours after first getting connected back “on the grid”. The moment cellular service was accessible was like drinking water after long hot day working in the sun. The phones started sounding with alerts and whistles aSquirrelnd our attention was quickly taken away from the present. Everyone except the driver of course. 🙂

Adults like to pick on teenagers with focus problems by quoting stats about video game usage and text messaging counts. Teenagers are known for using thousands of text messages per month but hardly any actual voice minutes. But adults have their own challenges for attention and focus. Think about conference calls at work where people who multi-task cause a speaker to have to repeat a question. What about co-workers that stop what they are doing every time a new email arrives? How many laptops were in your last meeting?

Learning more.

I’m reading the book Focus – The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman to explore and learn more about the science behind focus and attention. Goleman says the following about multitasking, “Then there’s what people think of as ‘spitting’ attention in multitasking which cognitive science tells us is fiction too. Rather than having a stretchable balloon of attention to deploy in tandem, we have a narrow, fixed pipeline to allot. Instead of splitting it, we actually switch rapidly. Continual switching saps attention from full, concentrated engagement.” This seems obvious but the battle for concentrated engagement is something we face everyday. How do we fight the battle?

Practical advice for work day attention deficit disorder.

I don’t submit that I’ve mastered each of these items. But I have used each of these tactics at various times to help myself stay more focused on the immediate task or meeting at-hand. I see this as a good list of tips for keeping our concentration and focus.

1. Don’t take your laptop to a meeting

What message do we send the meeting organizer and other participants when we show up to a meeting and start working on other things with our laptop?  How can we fully participate in a meeting and add-value if we are half-focused? If this piece of advice is difficult to follow then we may need to ask ourselves if we really need to be a participant in the meeting.

I know some people show up with a laptop to take notes. But others clearly do not. I like revert back to the traditional pen and paper. I take notes about the meeting and later transcribe to my computer. This isn’t the most efficient work habit since it involves rekeying something. But I find that it does help me to concentrate on the meeting at-hand and participate more. In theory doing something like this will help our knowledge absorption and memory of the meeting as well.

2. Leave email closed during the time of day you want to concentrate.

Goleman quotes a research group from Carnegie Mellon University, “The most precious resource in a computer system is no longer its processor, memory, disk, or network, but rather human attention”. Despite the ability of our equipment to have multiple programs open we are still limited in many ways to our own attention.

One aspect of our daily work routines that challenges many people is the ‘new email’ indicator. Visual pop-ups and sounds pull our attention away from a current work task. We lose context on our task when we check email and ultimately take longer to complete that task. Things that are more important yield to things that are immediate.

If you are working on something really important and easily distracted by email then my advice is to close email or at least disable notifications. Save email for specific times during the day.

3. Leave social media sites for home or lunch

I don’t struggle with this one. There’s plenty to do during the workday and social media sites don’t cross my mind. I do use twitter and LinkedIn to check items related to business industry, but I don’t do any personal social media at work.  If you are challenged by this then look for ways to reduce the reminder. Maybe that means putting the mobile device in a drawer.  Maybe it means installing a browser add-on like Stay Focused to help limit the time spent on certain sites.

4. Find a way to minimize multi-tasking during conference calls.

We’ve all been on calls when someone says “I’m sorry can you repeat that?” Certainly there are times when this is legitimate because conference calls can have audio challenges. But it’s often because the person is multitasking and not paying attention.

I’ll admit I struggle with this one. The computer screen is visually in front of me during a call and it’s way to easy to get pulled into email or some other distraction. A few techniques I use to keep myself focused are to stand-up from my chair or walk away from my desk (if on mobile phone). This is a simple way to stay more focused on the conversation. Another idea is to turn off the computer monitor and break out the pen and paper.