https://blog.logustus.com/categories/productivity/ Recent content in Productivity on Logan Barnett's blog Hugo en-us Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:05:00 +0000 https://blog.logustus.com/meetings/ Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:05:00 +0000 https://blog.logustus.com/meetings/ <p>Who hasn&rsquo;t wasted tons of time in meetings? Meetings are a joke in all organizations, and the joke is always the same - they are meaningless wastes of time. I&rsquo;ve heard the sweet promises of things like Scrum, pomodoros, <a href="http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigslist-to-slap-me-in-the-face-and-why-it-quadrupled-my-productivity/">people slapping you in the face when you open Facebook</a> all as means to reduce waste in the workplace. The thing is, none of them are nearly as damaging as meetings.</p> <p>The reason we have meetings are noble ones, but misguided in their attempts to solve a problem. Short of a masquerade for some political agenda, meetings have a singular purpose: share information. Information sharing is hard and how many of us are just awesome at writing documentation constantly? How about grooming that documentation and making sure it&rsquo;s well organized? As a result, people are left out of the loop. They want to form a meeting so they can ask questions and get people nodding heads on the path forward. The problem is that even with meeting notes, real documentation hasn&rsquo;t been made. The information exchanged in a meeting is transient to the members of the meeting, and even then only to their recollection. Meeting notes without context are meaningless, and meeting notes don&rsquo;t really contribute to a growing knowledge base - they are a log more than anything. Someone kept minutes.</p>