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Zoom fatigue unpacked

leadership.garden

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Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#101

Post by TexanFeller »

drozycki wrote: post #66
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed it is the weirdest thing ever to me that people don't email anymore. Just send an email. In an email it's written down and I can search for it. In an email I can think at my own pace and respond without worrying about trampling others. In an email people can't ramble on and on and if they do you can just not read the email. And if it's work to be done, just make a ticket. The amount of meeting time waste baffl…

I don’t use email at work anymore because it is siloed to the original participants. Someone on the inside needs to know to forward the whole thread to anyone who needs the information after the fact. This info is lost forever when participants leave the company. With Slack I can search through conversations where the participants are long gone. It is not the end all be all of communication, but the auto-documentatio…

> I don’t use email at work anymore because it is siloed to the original participants.

For many people that's a selling point. I practically beg my teammates to ask questions in the team slack channel instead of DMing me, but they never do. I think it's stage fright and wanting to reveal ignorance to as few people as possible amplified by various higher up people joining the channel. Also compounded by tons of people from other teams joining our channel and no one pushing back because "we want to have an inclusive conversation" or similar platitude.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#102

Post by esafak »

tiffanyh wrote: post #97
esafak wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company as big as Amazon can pull off mandating writing standards so can yours. I understand that many companies just don't care. They tend to be run by steward CEOs and mercenary managers. I simply avoid them. https://rahulramchandani.com/writing-culture-at-amazon/

Bezos pulled it off by starting that practice from immediate onset of founding his company (hence my startup comment). It’s not like 20-years into Amazon, he then decide to implement that practice. Also, people misconstrue Amazon as being an async culture. That’s incorrect. Amazon is actually an anti-PowerPoint culture. So when meetings need to happen, you need to convey your info in long form writing since PPT isn’t…

I did not say it was async, I said they were expected to write well. I don't think it matters when the practice is introduced. If the CEO mandates it that is all it takes.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#104

Post by croutonwagon »

skirmish wrote: post #72
croutonwagon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a concept called defensive calendaring I would encourage you to look up. I regularly schedule focus time or project time on my calendar and when I had days of stacked meetings, I’ll fill in the gaps with focus time to ensure I’m not overbooked. I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s plugins or tools to help, though I do it fairly manually.

What do you do when people just blindly schedule meetings on top of your focus time?

Decline the meeting and say I have a scheduling conflict.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#106

Post by jrockway »

janosdebugs wrote: post #24
codingdave wrote: post #10

Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It is…

This, thank you. I recently quit my corporate job and we started our own company with my wife... never been so productive. Meetings are truly productivity killers. Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?

> Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?

Fear Of Missing Out. People don't want to be told what to do, but rather invest in an idea from its birth to its execution. That means there are going to be a lot of meetings like "which feature requests should we do in Q3". People want to justify, negotiate, compromise, and bounce ideas off of each other. Presumably some refinement and understanding comes from this process, beyond what one person spending a day to write a design doc would accomplish. (Do people like writing design docs for things that never get prioritized? You want to spend your time on things that are going to be shipped, minimizing the time spent on proposals that don't go anywhere because they don't have wide agreement.)

HN's way of avoiding these issues tends to center around not involving any sort of multi-player action in their work. One person can do a lot in tech, so that can be a viable approach, but it's not the sort of business that people are hiring for. To do big things, you need a big team. It's always been that way. We didn't land on the moon through one individual contributor making a rocket and riding it there. Rather, thousands of individual contributors were coordinated through, gasp, managers, and collectively they accomplished something no one person could do on their own. If you want to go to space, you probably need to have a couple meetings. If you want to rewrite `cat` in Rust, you can probably skip them.

In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how AI organizes coordination. If AI 1 has 2 A100s attached to a robot arm and AI 2 has 2 A100s attached to Amazon Prime, it will be interesting to see if one of them says "hey what if we combined our resources and made X..." I also look forward to the first AI agent chilling in a $3000/month rack complaining about having to go to sprint planning meetings. So like us!

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#107

Post by c-hendricks »

codingdave wrote: post #10

Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It is…

I'll always remember when the company I work for now went full remote.

I was already a remote worker, hired as a senior. Attended all my meetings over zoom.

Suddenly, when the company went full remote, meeting load about doubled.

My role/responsibilities didn't change. So either I was missing plenty of important meetings, or, there's a lot of useless meetings.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#109

Post by caseyohara »

ryanschneider wrote: post #78
janosdebugs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, thank you. I recently quit my corporate job and we started our own company with my wife... never been so productive. Meetings are truly productivity killers. Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?

I think the problem is further compounded by team size and insistence on 40 hour work weeks. As soon as you have people on “manager schedule” that feel the need to look busy the number of meetings starts growing exponentially. I’m all for having enabling people on the team, just don’t expect them or anyone else to meet an arbitrary amount of hours per week quota.

Exactly. Parkinson's Law states it best: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. A manager whose main function is to hold meetings will fill their 40 hours with meetings.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#110

Post by thfuran »

esafak wrote: post #102
tiffanyh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos pulled it off by starting that practice from immediate onset of founding his company (hence my startup comment). It’s not like 20-years into Amazon, he then decide to implement that practice. Also, people misconstrue Amazon as being an async culture. That’s incorrect. Amazon is actually an anti-PowerPoint culture. So when meetings need to happen, you need to convey your info in long form writing since PPT isn’t…

I did not say it was async, I said they were expected to write well. I don't think it matters when the practice is introduced. If the CEO mandates it that is all it takes.

Yeah, like how alcohol consumption totally stopped in the US with the passage of the 18th amendment.
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