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.