(or “Using Collaborative Tools to Maximize Group Productivity While Preserving Humanity”)
I just want to go on record as saying that I hate meetings. They are the bane of my existence. I can tolerate physical pain, hard labor, rigorous discussion, tours, and watching paint dry, but the stagnation and sheer uselessness of the typical workplace meeting makes me want to die. (On a related note, see design by committee for another bureaucratic concept that forces me to consider giving life up.) Some things I have done to avoid meetings include: double booking, playing sick, claiming to be out of the country, claiming to be hospitalized, and quitting on the spot.
Why do I hate meetings? Because I see the uses of my time as falling into three different baskets: fun time, work time, and fun work time. Meetings certainly are not fun…only the worst bureaucratic mediocrities would profess this view. Even worse, they inhibit my personal productivity, detracting from time I can be using to actually get stuff done.
Fortunately, modern civilization has solutions to mitigate some of the damage meetings propagate upon the human soul. Two tools that I’ve found particularly helpful for reducing the need for meetings (both in frequency and length) are Google Apps and Basecamp.
- Google Apps (or Google Accounts for the non-tech savvy user) saves time through several of its products. Google Docs has leapfrogged ahead of its competition in the collaborative editing arena this past year, making document sharing, real time editing, participant management, change tracking, formatting, and commenting wonderfully simple. Google Mail’s threaded mail feature is also great for project work, allowing users to keep track of hundreds of group communications in one email window.
- Basecamp, made by the incredible 37signals, is the best project management application I’ve worked with. At its free tier, it allows you to create a project, invite an unlimited number of participants, set milestones, assign to-do list items, and selectively email group members updates. The interface is quite simple, and it offers scores of minor features which make the whole experience of group collaboration smoother. Some features that really stand out to me are iCal integration, commenting on to-do items, custom calendar views, and the assignment of to-do items to project milestones. Wonderful software. I look forward to trying it out in my class groups this fall…we’ll see just how
foolidiot-proof it is.
Of course, these tools are only as effective as your most apathetic, mediocre group member or bureaucrat. The real challenge of our times seems to be promoting adoption of these new paradigm technologies, incentivizing administrative incompetents to change. Alas, I wish I had a solution for this problem.
“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings’” ~Dave Barry
Comments are closed.