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I can second this; at Google I've found that meetings are unusually productive because of the practice. For the most part, regular meetings will follow a fairly

I can second this; at Google I've found that meetings are unusually productive because of the practice. For the most part, regular meetings will follow a fairly strict agenda, which keeps them moving and stops them from going off on tangents (not always, sometimes tangents do happen, for better or worse, but I've found that it's for better significantly more often than at previous workplaces). And the presence of laptops helps here -- people can add bullet items to upcoming agenda items to ensure that they are discussed, without having to interrupt the conversation currently in progress, and the use of a single document means that the historical record is easily accessible. For meetings that are more oriented as design sessions or free-form discussions, the laptops tend to go away because they are not useful in that situation, unless you're at a point where data that can be quickly acquired can be useful.

malkia 9y ago
To a degree, the same happens with a design doc - you may start it with a peer, or have manager oversee it, or pull someone from a team, from which you rely on specific technology to gain more confidence for you, and whoever later reads the design doc that all important bits are covered... For example decision to use system A (from your point of view) may be good idea, but owners of system A may no longer support it, or may have in plans to deprecate it soon, but haven't announced it yet, so adding key personnel there would help for sure. I'm trying this new model at my new workplace, but I'm already seeing pain doing this with Outlook (the desktop version), the Mobile version is much better in this respect, though the comment system need some features, that I got used to (assigning action-items). The other approach would be google for business, but I'm not a decision maker here. (Or some other cool product - EtherPad?)

malkia 9y ago

To a degree, the same happens with a design doc - you may start it with a peer, or have manager oversee it, or pull someone from a team, from which you rely on specific technology to gain more confidence for you, and whoever later reads the design doc that all important bits are covered... For example decision to use system A (from your point of view) may be good idea, but owners of system A may no longer support it, or may have in plans to deprecate it soon, but haven't announced it yet, so adding key personnel there would help for sure. I'm trying this new model at my new workplace, but I'm already seeing pain doing this with Outlook (the desktop version), the Mobile version is much better in this respect, though the comment system need some features, that I got used to (assigning action-items). The other approach would be google for business, but I'm not a decision maker here. (Or some other cool product - EtherPad?)