on 04-08-2015 9:08 PM
When mug is empty, it is actually filled with air.
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At one job we had a good practice that a meeting invitation without clear agenda would be rejected. Also the meetings were scheduled to run for 45 minutes instead of an hour because if you have adjacent meetings you need some space in between.
Sadly, too many times it's too many people (and not even the right people) stuck in the room for too long with no clear agenda or action items. All so that someone could happily report that "we had a meeting on this" as if it solves anything.
I should give these mugs (actually make those espresso cups) for Christmas to our management.
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We have a weekly team status meeting and a monthly stakeholders "advisory" meeting that I attend regularly, in addition to impromptu or larger departmental meetings. The weekly meeting rarely has an agenda ahead of time, but the boss writes one up quickly on the whiteboard at the start, and sometimes we even follow it. The monthly meeting does have an agenda published ahead of time, but we struggle to get stakeholders to, well, have a stake in it. It always seems like IT is controlling the agenda, but if we don't, no one else will step up. On the other hand, we can't do much at all without approval of those stakeholders -- not even an upgrade. That's why we're now out of maintenance on SRM and scrambling to finish an upgrade as quickly as we can.
Over the years, we've played with different formats for the weekly meeting. There is a school of thought that the agenda should not be created ahead of time for these types of meetings, and that the group should (democratically) create the agenda first thing, at the start of the meeting. We tried that for a while (when I was the interim boss), and I think it worked fairly well, as it allowed people to air things that were important to them and got discussion flowing. But, it didn't last, and now it's again a very top-down meeting. At least we dropped the "round-robin" "what are you working on?" business where everyone spent the time figuring what to say when it was their turn (so they could look busy) and no one listened to anything else that was said -- that was horrible and completely non-productive. It never engendered any discussion. That was the first thing up against the wall when the revolution came.
Maybe that's the reason, why on meetings that are scheduled for a long timeframe, there is always coffee. And it gets refilled.
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does this mean you walk into meetings that you don't want to be at with a near-empty mug?
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Most days I spend a lot of time standing up at my desk (I have a sit-stand desk, and I'm a big fan of these), so the chance to sit for an hour without guilt in a meeting actually makes the meeting more palatable. We have one small conference room, good for no more than 4-5 people, that we use a lot for impromptu meetings, that has no air vents in it. If you shut the door, it doesn't take long before the air gets a bit stale and everyone starts nodding off to sleep.
Well, to be clear, it's a low-walled cubicle. The sit-stand desk is a contraption that sits on top of the built-in cubicle desk. With the low walls, when I'm standing, I am looking over the tops of all the cubicles in this very large, open room, with about a hundred or hundred-twenty cubicles within my sight. Go around a corner (still same room), and there's another hundred.
I need one of these stand up desks since Sitting is the new smoking!
"Sitting for prolonged periods of time can lead to loss of muscle mass and an increase in fat predominately in the midsection, Goldenberg added, which can be a precursor for obesity-related diseases. Additionally, when you sit, there is a decreased demand on the cardiovascular system. So for instance your heart rate will slow down, he said."
Yep! I dug up tons of articles about the various health risks of sitting for prolonged periods. I think the one that scared/provoked me most was Is Sitting A Lethal Activity? on the New York Times (the Times did a whole series on this a few years back). I would forward these articles to my boss whenever I found them, and it only took a few years to get it approved.... Actually, the reason it took so long is there was one person on my team who had gotten one and then after a month or two was never observed by management to stand it up again, so they concluded it was a waste of money. They never did buy a new one for me; they just took it away from the other person and gave me that one. However, since then, organizationally there has been more focus on employee health, and now three on my team alone have (and use!) these desks, and they're starting to gradually pop up (literally, haha) in other teams and departments. I regularly have people coming around my cube to look at mine, asking questions about it, and I'm always happy to demonstrate. I'm something of an evangelist for these things.
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