Thoughts on meetings

The COVID experience has really caused me to appreciate the value of the face to face experience. However, I feel at many meetings (could be formal or just having a meal with someone) we still don’t really maximize the value of being in-person with someone. In a meeting, everyone should be engaged during the entire meeting. This means things need to keep moving. The focus needs to be on interpersonal interaction, solving hard problems, brainstorming, making decisions, etc – things that engage people. If one person does most of the taking, it is not a meeting, it is a presentation. If most people are looking at their computers or phones most of the time, this could mean several things:

  1. we are doing work during the meeting
  2. attendees are bored and are not engaged
  3. we have not prepared for the meeting

Other thoughts on meetings:

Gitlab’s approach is rather profound:

And then after the meeting you have to look at the takeaways in the Google Doc, which is just a temporal home, and you have to say “Alright, if anything in this meeting matters to more than just me, I have to go find the right place(s) in the handbook and make a merge request to actually add this to the handbook”, because the handbook is the ultimate single source of truth, where all of the company would go to to find the latest and greatest information on whatever the topic is. So what I’m saying is that’s a lot of work in a meeting…

Documentation should be the center of real work. If decisions and thinking are not captured for easy access by others, it is of limited use and will likely soon be lost. It is also important that thoughts be captured in a format that can be easily modified and expanded on in the future. This is the power of content stored in Git with pull requests – the thinking does not stop at the end of the meeting, but rather the meeting can be the start of something that continues on in one continuous flow of creative thought as people collaborate, open pull requests, discuss them with comments, meet again to brainstorm and solve hard problems, etc. A meeting is then not a disruptive speed bump in your schedule, but rather a well synchronized input into the flow of creative work, which all revolves around fluid documentation and never stops. Meetings are not for status reports, boring monologues, power posturing, etc, but rather to maximize the creative output of a group of people working together in real time.

@cbrake have your thoughts on meetings changed at all in the past 2 years?

Since I’ve been remote now for about 2.5 years, one thing I do very much miss about physical in-person meetings is just the change of location and being able to do a different thing with my body. When my work and my meetings are all just me sitting at my computer, everything feels the same. A physical in-person meeting requires me to physically move somewhere else and sit differently and behave differently. I do miss this change of pace in my day.

I’m definitely not an extrovert but I am starting to miss in-person meetings.

Throughout my career, meetings were not that profitable in the sense of getting things done – perhaps necessary, but not efficient. Video calls are OK, but they definitely don’t take the place of in-person and have a fatiguing nature to them that is well documented. For technical virtual meetings, I generally prefer everyone share their screens the entire meeting. For distributed teams, lively discussions on a chat platform like Skype, Slack, Signal, IRC, and now Discourse are one of the best ways to develop good team relationships, and async collaboration tools are the best ways to get things done. Chat can be distracting at times, but I feel it’s necessary to develop relationships and adds some fun into interactions. What is most energizing to me is a nice clip of async collaboration (issue comments, pull requests, git commits, etc) mixed with some instant messaging. In summary:

  • Good:
    • async collaboration tools like Git, PRs, Issues
    • virtual meetings where everyone shares screens
    • instant messaging (chat)
    • highly structured and engaging in-person meetings
    • informal gatherings such as lunch meetings, conferences, etc
    • one-on-one phone calls (we generally don’t do this enough)
  • Bad:
    • email – while useful for notifications and communication with people outside our organization/team, it is generally a huge drain of time and energy when used as the primary communication mechanism within a team. and very little long term knowledge is captured for the effort expended.
    • video meetings with video of multiple people on
    • unstructured in-person meetings
    • status reporting meetings

I’ve worked from a home office for 17 years now and probably have a little different scenario than most people. We home-school our children, so there is generally people around – at bit noisy at times, but never lonely. We often eat three meals a day together. When kids are old enough to work on their own, they work in the same area I work in. Just the corner of an unfinished basement – nothing fancy, but with in-floor heat, it is the most comfortable office I’ve ever worked in. After lunch, I usually take an hour break and work outside, in the wood shop, or some non-desk activity. I got into (in some cases back into) gardening, chickens, ducks, woodworking, car mechanics, etc in the course of finding useful activities for kids to do and ended up discovering that these activities are enjoyable and helpful for maintaining some balance in life. I was raised doing a lot of outdoor hands-on type activities, but left off most of that in my twenties when I was focused on work. However, now that I’m back into the homestead lifestyle (in a small way), I hope I can keep doing that until I die – seems to be a very healthy (and sustainable) in many ways.

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I guess I should answer your question – I don’t think my thoughts on meetings have changed a lot in the last 2 years, but have become more refined – especially with the proliferation of video calls. My work and even personal life situation did not change drastically with COVID, as it did with many. Several people I know started working from home during COVID and have not gone back to the office. Seems like a mix would be nice, but for most, it’s all or nothing.

This is an interesting section from a letter to shareholders on how Amazon does meetings:

Six-Page Narratives

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

In the handstand example, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize high standards. It wouldn’t be difficult to lay out in detail the requirements of a well-executed handstand, and then you’re either doing it or you’re not. The writing example is very different. The difference between a great memo and an average one is much squishier. It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

An here is one person’s experience in these meetings.