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Realistically the latter is extremely common in business settings. A small percentage of business meetings even need to happen, much less need the presence of a
by kyllo 11y ago
Realistically the latter is extremely common in business settings. A small percentage of business meetings even need to happen, much less need the presence of all attendees.
- megaman22 11y agoThis. 95% of meetings could be replaced by sending a couple of emails, or just paying attention to the bug tracker/version control system.
- Ma8ee 11y agoOr just paying attention and being focused in the first meeting.
- megaman22 11y agoMeetings are generally run by people that like to hear themselves talk. Those of us that have to get shit done don't get a lot of benefit from hearing people bikeshed and ramble for forty-five minutes or an hour, when you could write up the ideas discussed in a more concrete form in five minutes and email it around. Text is a whole lot more efficient than talk. People actually have to present ideas in a coherent way when they are written down, since it's actually in a persistent form and doesn't admit the same hand-waviness and slop that speech does.
- Ma8ee 11y agoIf you consider meetings as one-way communication then I understand that you think it is a waste of time. But if you are trying to understand what a non-technical customer actually needs, then a ten minute meeting might save you a hundred emails and a lot of grievances in the end. To write effective emails, you need to have a common language, which is missing more often than some people realize.
- ryandrake 11y agoMany of those 95% happen because either: 1. People don't read their E-mails promptly or 2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail. I've seen E-mail chains that lasted WEEKS, where a 45-minute meeting would have been enough to resolve the problem.
- megaman22 11y ago> 2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail. Use IM, a chat room, whatever. Just use something that is persistent and can actually be referenced afterwards.
- ryandrake 11y agoAt which point, you might as well be in a physical meeting. You're either synchronously communicating (and not paying attention to something else) or you're not.
- megaman22 11y agoExcept a physical meeting involves getting up from your desk, going somewhere, waiting around for everybody else to get there, having whatever meeting you're supposed to be having, hopefully without anyone taking it off the rails into some unrelated tangent, winding down the meeting, then going back to your desk. There's a lot of wasted time there, and I get very irritated by other people wasting my time. Then there's the fact that nobody ever records the audio of in-person meetings, and almost never actually takes minutes or notes of what was decided, so the only record of it is the progressively hazy memories of the participants. So then you have another meeting next week to rehash the shit you just went over.
- ryandrake 11y agoBesides the need for brief physical activity, these are people-problems and not problems specific to physical meetings. Showing up late can happen in chat rooms. Taking it off the rails into a tangent can happen in chat rooms. Not ensuring accurate minutes are recorded is a failure of whoever is conducting the meeting, and should never happen.