killthemeeting

Why is the life of the modern IT worker an endless series of not only mind-numbing but also amazingly useless meetings?  Why is it I can be more productive at home, telecommuting, than I can in the office, a place ostensibly designed for the purpose of work? 

I blame Microsoft Exchange.  Back before Exchange and its precursor Lotus Notes, scheduling a meeting was hard.  You had to call or email everybody, and try to find a time that would work for everyone.  Alternately, you could autocratically declare a time if you had sufficient authority, and just accept that some people wouldn't show up.  Meetings were mainly a periodic, scheduled thing -- you knew the project plan meeting was Wednesday at 2:00, the team meeting was Monday at 8:00, and your meeting with your manager was on Thursdays.  There weren't many, and those there were tended to have pretty large groups at them.  But now, thanks to groupware like Exchange (you probably know it as the Outlook calendar) and Notes, everyone can see everyone's calendar, so scheduling a meeting is quick and effortless.  The result is not just more meetings, but the creation of the ad hoc meeting -- the meeting you can't plan around because nobody bothers to schedule it until the day or even the hour before it happens.  This is impossible for telecommuters.

The technology aimed to solve a problem -- it was too difficult and inconvenient for people who needed to schedule meetings to do so.  The failure is that it worked too well -- it eliminated the transaction cost for scheduling a meeting.  I can now, in 5 minutes, take an hour of time from 10 people by scheduling a meeting with them.  Since I can see their calendars, they're even robbed of most convenient excuses.  If it took me two hours of phone calls to call all those people and arrange things, I might not even bother.  What's more, I can now easily schedule meetings with numbers of people that would have been quite impractical the old way.  Yet in my experience, the usefulness of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people attending it (yet its length seems to be directly proportional to attendees.)  The technology has created a new problem -- too many meetings.  This is one of the major reasons I actually get more work done in 5 hours at home than I do in 8 hours at work -- at home, I can work on things that are important, and when someone has a question, they send me an email I can answer in 5 minutes instead of scheduling an hour-long meeting.

To free workers from their commutes, we must kill the meeting.  Now, while I imagine I could easily get a cheering mob of office workers to joyfully chant "Kill the meeting!" (I've yet to meet someone who likes meetings), actually doing away with it is more difficult -- constant ad hoc meetings have become a major part of company culture in the American workplace. One possibility is that the only way out is through -- perhaps technology can solve the problem it created.

The latest buzzword in groupware and office applications is "presence."  Thanks to an in-development project called Istanbul that I used while at Microsoft, Windows Messenger now integrates with Exchange, to connect your IM free/busy information to your calendar (i.e. IM marks you "Away" during meetings on your calendar, etc.)  The idea is to make IM free/busy information a virtual indicator of if you're available or not.  If you open a Word document in Office12 (the next version of Office) in an Exchange-enabled environment, the sidebar has the IM icons for the other people who have worked on the document, complete with if they're available or not.  You can dispatch IMs to them right there with questions about the document, and they'll get the IM with links to the document so they can see what you're talking about.  If they open it, they get the same view you're looking at.  You can share the document and edit it simultaneously, while also able to IM chat (or voice chat, if you have PC headsets, or even videoconference if you have webcams.)  In other words, you can have an ad hoc meeting without leaving your desk.

This is not without its share of problems.  Just what we need -- one more way to be distracted by other people while you're trying to get work done.  It'll probably lower productivity overall -- every context-switch kills about 15 minutes of productivity, and people being able to IM you about document questions results in constant context-switching.  But... it does create virtual presence.  This sort of system allows telecommuters to do the virtual equivalent of dropping into each other's offices carrying a printout.  And since offices will blindly adopt it whether it's good for productivity or not -- just like they did with shared calenars -- it'll be out there in any case.