Classic or Dud: Typing on laptops in meetings

stick it to The Man

Classic! So many meetings are a waste of time or if not initially so descend into that p quickly, even in organisations which are aware of this.

depends on the meeting but usually dud. no problem if people are taking notes about the meeting, just tell me that's what you're doing so I don't think you're being a cock.

Silverfish's post in the other thread made perfect sense. It wouldn't happen in my work area (housing) but I can see how it could work in other areas. The flipside which I see a lot of is unfocused meetings with too many people not contributing and/or trying not to fall asleep. Not best value for money.

I swear I read the title as "trying on tampons in meetings"

conference calls are worst for this. when you get the "oh sorry I wasn't listening, I was on another call"... just fuck off then

can we get some minute-takers to weigh in

if you're not getting anything out of the meeting, just tell me and leave. don't sit there to hide from your boss for an hour

had a lol conference call here where someone on the other end had a loud keyboard clacking throughout; i pictured Jerry Lewis.

in my workplace if someone starts typing i assume it's because the meeting has moved into a territory that doesn't concern them for legit reasons, like a part of the work that is not too much to do with them. it's v collaborative work and there are times when everyone needs to listen or be involved but equally there are times when someone doesn't, or when two people go off on a tangential discussion or whatever.

^^^

I don't see what the big deal is

The meetings during which I type are ones where I have a vote but don’t feel much need to argue my point (for a candidate, or a proposal, etc). The real work of marshaling votes has already happened, now we have an hour+ to blah blah blah before the basically already decided vote. People want to preen, be “on the record”, but the vote, the most crucial thing, takes but a second. (Unless someone’s decided that the vote must be unanimous, ugh.)

I'm just gonna repost this:

So many times there are people in meetings who are there just in case the other people need their knowledge and/or opinion on specific things on which they are experts. You want to have these people near if anything comes up for which you need their input but at the same time you don't want to waste an hour of their time, so you invite them to the meeting and let them work on their own things, and a couple of times per meeting you ask them to pay attention and answer some questions. It's the most efficient way to get the work done.

― silverfish, Friday, November 17, 2017 9:59 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess this doesn't necessary apply to all work places, but in my field (software development) this is very common

If shit doesn't matter to you then you should leave the meeting or not show up in the first place. Ergo, I blame the manager who runs meetings and invites everyone like it's a game of kickball and everyone needs to get picked.

Or, if there's a part of the meeting that is more ad hoc in scope, then get that shit taken care of soon so that the rest of us who actually need to meet as a group don't waste your time.

silverfish otm tho i work in the same world as that.

most orgs are addicted to useless meetings. most meetings go on too long. even in a culture that's conscious of the time wasted by meetings unless everybody there fully buys into the avoidance of wasting time and boring everyone to the point of their enthusiasm being significantly dulled, and understands its value, unless you have like 90 per cent of people making a conscious effort not to waste time, you still end up with people who think that talking more, or for longer, makes them seem smart. that's how engrained it is.

we have a standup meeting every morning to say what we did the day before and what we're going to do that day. there are a few people who constantly delay it, constantly talk for too long, despite the fact that it's been made clear the point is to just say what's relevant to the team. almost invariably they are the ones with a retrograde view of what's impressive in a workplace whose every sentence is loaded with formal business cliches etc etc to bulk up whatever it is they're saying. no amount of polite reminders will ever work, the org i'm in just isn't quite there culturally for it to be nbd to say "okay save it for outside the meeting" or whatever. my previous office it was a point of pride in the team to get the standup meeting done as quickly as possible, anyone could at any time say "maybe deal with this after" and the person talking would apologise and laugh. it was normal, it happened now and again to everyone, and it ensured the entire purpose of having a standup, ie you're standing so it doesn't last long, is not made into a form of heel torture.

i realise that sounds potentially awful but the workplace that noticed efficiency or fostered a culture of quick meetings, or weeding out unnecessary meetings, or allowing people to do what they want, ie type in a meeting, or just not go to a meeting, that's the same culture that had the strongest awareness of depression, disability, lgbt issues, and the individuality of each person working there.

personally, long and unnecessary meetings brew a lot of negative feelings in me about the job and the workplace. i doubt i'm the only one. presumably most people want to do the job at which they're skilled. that's not to say it's like headphones on all day and never talk to anyone, it can be important to meet people and to know the wider goings on or whatever, but meeting inflation is a serious fucking problem in so many offices.

"maybe you should come along to this one" - the worst fucking words in the office phrasebook

silverfish & localgarda otm

the best managers and meeting facilitators get the meeting over with as soon as possible. most managers don't do this so it becomes necessary to take things into my own hands.

my last workplace did a lot of short, 15-20 minute standup meetings, they were way more efficient and probably covered the same territory as the bullshit 90 minute meetings i now have that force me to bring my laptop

i worked at a company where we had an all-day retreat at a local hotel and the meeting took forever and was USELESS. it was for a video sharing website we were launching. the only thing i remember was at one point our boss presented a slide with a medium sized circle and said, "This is YouTube." He then clicked to a slide showing a much larger circle, compared to the previous looking like Betelgeuse about to consume Earth. He then said, "This is what we will be compared to YouTube!" Then everyone started applauding and cheering while my co-worker and I looked at each other, ashen (and applauding), because we'd been discussing the terrible design of the site and none of these people listened to our mild advice that it needed cleaning up, a better name, a better interface, a new everything. People started rising to their feet, clapping, it started to feel like Wolf of Wall Street.

Anyway at its peak the site had 270 users, 200 of which were friends of people at the company, an additional one being a fake profile I created for our cat.

meetings are useless.

does anyone still use gotomeeting

Classic. And I like meetings, well most meetings. Even if I’m just sitting in there working on something else, it’s a good break from sitting at my desk. It breaks up my day.

wow, dud

It's awesome when my current partner is hosting a Skype meeting for multiple employees and we can all watch her doing a horrible job of multitasking, ask stupid questions because she's not paying attention, hear her personal phone line ring off the hook, and then of course declare a hard stop ten minutes before the meeting is scheduled to end.

i worked at a company where we had an all-day retreat at a local hotel and the meeting took forever and was USELESS

lol these are the fucking pits and they're so common in bad organisations. it's like if your workplace is fucked and everyone is listless and none of the structures work... "i know! an all-day meeting with 100 people will energise the workforce" - no it fucking won't - it'll literally prompt people to start checking for jobs at lunch. i find this stuff sad cos most workplaces just get culture completely wrong and it's incredibly hard to fix, hard won and easily lost. my current workplace is okay, the culture isn't amazing but there are enough people who've worked in good places that good practices hold together, and we're mostly contractors so it's easier to subvert and erode the bad old school stuff. that said we had an all-day meeting about tech planning for the next six months a few weeks ago. i left after an hour and went back to the office, figured i'd defend this with "i had a lot of work to do".

i wonder if these votes are proxies for officer/enlisted class

meetings are the worst. document the thing and broadcast it for review and revision. don't trap me in a room for an hour.

unless there's food. in that case, god bless you

God I hate meeting culture. I hate it even more when I had to be the one taking minutes.

i'm prob giving too many opinions itt but also like, there's a whole culture of "politeness" in big organisations which isn't actually politeness, it's just subjugation or some stifling need for everyone to grant undeserved self-importance and obsequiousness to the business and its aims. the civil service is fucking rife with this - like it infects everything, the way people speak and send emails, the constant need to defer things to others, the big bloated meetings, the fear of actually making a direct comment about the work.

i'm not for a second advocating rudeness, just openness as opposed to like "good manners" or whatever other power-centric hierarchical notions.

xxp

i believe this is how most of my workplaces have made meetings less of a pits

"there are coffee, doughnuts, muffins behind you"

*everyone lines up*

more classic is PLAYING a keyboard during a meeting

if i didn't type on laptops in meetings i couldn't possibly get my job done. sometimes i just leave.

so many meetings can be avoided by calling someone, or better still making a fucking decision, instead of calling 30 people into a 12-seat room for 1.5 hours to thrash out one pissy little thing nobody would ever have noticed.

Fucking A, I love that my quasi-sociopathic habit became the subject of an ILX poll. As I said in the other thread, much of my laptopping during meetings is doing the action stuff I'd otherwise have to do after the meeting - circulating a document, making a list, checking a policy etc. - so I don't forget and I can leave the meeting behind me when I get back to wasting time.

xxxp omar that story is glorious

lmao @ that story.

- I rarely take my laptop to meetings, preferring a notebook instead
- I commonly will not go to standing meetings that do not have agendas in advance
- I do not consider decisions made at meetings without agendas or minutes/after the fact communications to be valid beyond the people present.
- I have refused a jobs at company where the interviewer was clearly doing non-interview work on their laptop.

Please don't use your laptops at meetings, or try fix what's broken that requires it.

i do this all the time, and also hypocritically call out other people when I see them do it. It's great

omar are you sure you weren't at a multilevel marketing seminar?

everybody multitasks. the "dud" is if you're the kind of dick who DOESN'T PUT YOUR PHONE ON FUCKING MUTE

also dudder: our current client contact, who once let someone talk for five minutes only to chime in with "I'm sorry, I wasn't really listening to you just now"

- I do not consider decisions made at meetings without agendas or minutes/after the fact communications to be valid beyond the people present

boss level

does anyone still use gotomeeting

*raises clip art hand on the lower right of your screen*

never enter your audio pin for voice control

such power belongs to god alone

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

This would rile me up so bad if someone started typing like David Carr in the clip below, but gotta say, it'd also boost my respect for them too.

https://youtu.be/iLmkec_4Rfo

vindicated

- I rarely take my laptop to meetings, preferring a notebook instead
- I commonly will not go to standing meetings that do not have agendas in advance
- I do not consider decisions made at meetings without agendas or minutes/after the fact communications to be valid beyond the people present.
- I have refused a jobs at company where the interviewer was clearly doing non-interview work on their laptop.

Please don't use your laptops at meetings, or try fix what's broken that requires it.

― fajita seas, Friday, November 17, 2017 10:35 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

killer post

If you are part of the secretariat, or so designated for the purposes of the meeting, you may type. Please do.

If you have ready access to an authoritative answer to a question that is raised during discussion, you may use your phone, until consensus no longer gives a shit.

If you have better things to do, you may excuse yourself. Or be excused, no fault.

The chair, or host / convener / facilitator of the meeting bears ultimate responsibility. Fundamentally, if you cannot get people to pay attention during your meetings that’s on you, and you need to work on that shit. Lord knows I have.

Been a while since I read it and I remember this being sexist and dated in a lot of ways but there’s some kernels of good advice in this 1976 HBR article https://hbr.org/1976/03/how-to-run-a-meeting

i mean if people insist i go to a 2 hr meeting and waste my fucking time of course i’m doing other work in there

there’s being ~present~ and there’s not being a tosspiece

Well there’s many kinds of meetings

The type I prefer demands different attitudes than others - and some things that Microsoft Outlook calls “meetings” aren’t at all what I think of when I think “meeting”

Perhaps we need to have a separate thread to cover scope and use cases

If shit doesn't matter to you then you should leave the meeting or not show up in the first place.

You guys must have really organized meetings if you know exactly what time the part of the meeting where your input/attention is relevant is happening.

I go to the meeting because there's gonna be some part of it I need to attend to. The rest of the time, you can bet I'm on my laptop doing my job. So are other people.

Christ I'm glad I never need to sit in these sort of meetings. 2 hours long!? Mutiple team involvement with hours of shit not relevant to a person? That sounds like a badly-framed meeting to me.

Attending conference calls on the toilet c/d

eephus knows the score

- I have refused a jobs at company where the interviewer was clearly doing non-interview work on their laptop.

This happened! Sat there for 2 minutes, him typing away after asking "You don't mind if I...?"

Then he looked up and asked 'Any questions?" So I said no. And waited.

Perhaps we need to have a separate thread to cover scope and use cases

― El Tomboto, Thursday, 23 November 2017 15:54 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also, outfits that think agile means loading up the entire project team to 240% capacity but it's okay because ~user stories~

2 hours long!? Mutiple team involvement with hours of shit not relevant to a person? That sounds like a badly-framed meeting to me.

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Thursday, 23 November 2017 16:30 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good lord it's like you were there

I love how loads of people in this thread, knowing nothing of others' work situations or the utility of the meetings they attend, feel justified in telling them how to behave there.

"I'm sorry you can't attend, this is a Type A personality meeting only, the Type B personality meeting is down the hall, just follow the anguished moaning"

sometimes people invite you to a meeting so they have proof you were in the room 12 weeks later when they need someone to blame for the catastrophe they saw coming

I love how loads of people in this thread, knowing nothing of others' work situations or the utility of the meetings they attend, feel justified in telling them how to behave there.

*taps on laptop*

Guys it's only work chill out

*Attends meeting, sits back, counts down retirement clock*

Our yearly allhands meeting is today. These ones are the worst. Ive been at this company 10 years now, so the repetition of them (they go over similar ground ever year) is mind numbing after the first one or 2. Thankfully they dont go on forever but even an hour or 2 is too much. Basically we all have to sit in hard chairs and stare at the CEO blabbering on a videoconf screen from the head office, as does everyone in all our satellite offices.

huh, I just realised that "standing meeting" has two distinct meanings and I had only been considering one of them