Classic or Dud: Typing on laptops in meetings

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