!rant

I received a pair of complements on how well I run team meetings after an engineering all staff this morning. Received a similar comment last week.

Someone asked “what’s your secret?”

I reply “Laziness”

“What?”

“I’m lazy. I don’t like meetings most of the time. So when I run meetings, I run them so that they’re over as fast as possible”

“How do you do that?”

“By knowing what I actually want”

“What if you don’t know what you want?”

“Then there’s no meeting”

“Well what if y-“

“Hey listen I have another meeting to get to”

I'm pretty sure your meeting can be an email

@crisz I’ve never done sprint planning and retros over email. Interesting. Got any links or suggested reading on how to make that work?

@crisz depends.

Meetings are the most misunderstood and misimplemented things in a company, falling under the large category of communication done wrong.

The part of a meeting that (should) matter is that it is focused on an agenda and only on the agenda... And an email has the downside that you usually don't get an emotional feedback, just facts.

Most meetings can be prevented, yes - but a no meeting policy isn't good.

Emotional feedback as in realizing someone is hitting a roadblock and stopping them before becoming 200 km/h vs concrete wall gooey.