These six are split across three operational meetings (each manager with their direct team, technical spec review, incident review), two developmental meetings (staff engineers, engineering managers) and finally a monthly engineering Q&A to learn what the organization is really thinking about.

My weekly team meetings always include my direct reports, and usually include our key partner in the Recruiting, People, and Finance teams. (I’ve also experimented with including engineers

where should the center of gravity be for this gathering? 

always take the meeting

Stop swapping boring professional stories and start connecting on a deeper level. Empathy is the social glue that engages people

You have no compassion for my poor nerves

When attending a networking event, preparation is key

you should never save for two meetingswhat you can accomplish in one.

Each developer on average wastes 30 minutes before and after the meeting to context switch and the time is otherwise non-value adding. (See this study for the cost of context switching).

Your aim should very rarely be to record conversations verbatim or to copy long stretches of quotes from text you are reading.

easily exploited by a bullshitter. To counter this,organizations should only establish committees andhave meetings when there are clear terms ofreference, a value-adding agenda, and the rightattendees who can contribute to the desiredagenda. More simply, the need for a meeting shouldbe questioned unless an important decision needs tobe made.

Appointment Booking Application

How do we make meetings better?

I’ve been considering proximity-based group meeting rooms, like wonder.me, but I worry slightly that the new room won’t work as intended and we’ll all be at sea.

Recent patent filings show that Microsoft has been exploring additional ideas to monitor workers in the interest of organizational productivity. One filing describes a “meeting insight computing system” that would generate a quality score for a meeting using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting.

Win back your calendar and stop wasting time in meetings. Our screen recorder can provide the context and connection of a meeting without the time commitment.

What if instead of public meetings—constrained by both time and space, where the optimal outcome is consensus and therefore “no” has more power than “yes”—we invested more in low cost, ongoing exercises that produce a high volume of information, persist even after particular projects are completed, make priorities transparent, and neither seek nor assume a singular position from “the community”?

OurIndianmeetinghasbeenattendedbyafewonly,exceptthechildrenwhobelongtotheschool.TheIndians,whenhere,havenotfeltmuchinterestincomingtohear.Thehearershavebeenprincipallyfemaleswhichbelongtothecivilizedfamilieshere

synchronously online on Mondays, 5-6pm

Set goals for the meeting. With any gathering there should be clearly defined outcomes that hope to come out of the meeting. These should be written somewhere prior to the start of the meeting—they can be written in an email, handout, or even on a white board—but make sure everyone clearly understands why are they present and what you are setting out to accomplish.

They have events like “Meetsy” (suggested lunch groups to meet people you may not work directly with) and “Eatsy” (where the entire company eats together).