ROWE is awesome. We all believe in ROWE. All meetings are optional.
Except everyone has to attend the bi-monthly two hour update meeting.
But aside from that, ROWE is great. You can work anywhere.
Except that our online meeting software sucks, and this is an important meeting, so you really need to be on-site for it. (There are meetings for which we don’t care about the quality of the online meeting software? Why are we having those meetings?)
Other than that, you can work anywhere, at any time as long as the work gets done.
(Outlook client and Exchange server are lumped together here.)
“Reply to all” goggles.
Test Mail Goggles (Photo credit: tchuntfr)
GMail once offered “mail googles” in Google Labs that would require you to solve 5 basic arithmetic problems in a certain amount of time in order to send a late night email. You were able to preset the difficulty and hours that it was active.
In an Outlook version, the mail server administrator could set the difficulty and type of problems required and possibility a minimum threshold of participants before it was required, so that a team of 3 people could “Reply to All”, but someone couldn’t reply to everyone on an email about health benefits with a question about their preexisting condition without at least jumping through a few hoops first.
Automatic large image converter and scaler.
Does Outlook still by default embed images from Windows as .bmp files? Being able to email screenshots is nice, but 1024×768 bitmaps will quickly eat up a stingy mail quota. The more tech-savvy users can quickly figure out how to emails as a web page and images as a lighter weight image format, but the users sending you screenshots of something that “isn’t working” aren’t as likely to be Outlook power users.
Split large attachments in Calendar invites into a separate mail message.
How often do you receive party or big event invitations that have an embedded 8.5″x11″ bitmap file that was exported from a PowerPoint slide in which the invitation was drawn? Isn’t it lovely that *everyone’s calendars* by default have that 3+ MB file in their Calendar, and when you look in Outlook folders for the messages that are eating up your [ridiculously small] mail quota, you can’t find them because they’re in your calendar?
At the expense of adding duplicate emails to my inbox, I’d rather have the message with attachment split off as a separate email that I could send immediately to my trash than a Calendar invite that I have to modify to save space.
Out-of-office replies only to original sender on an email chain
Out-of-office replies only get sent one time to a sender, but nothing is more annoying than having to reply-to-all on an email chain, only to get blasted by “out-of-office” replies.
“Unsubscribe” for email chains.
Imagine that someone included you on a email about a topic because they thought you were a stakeholder, or maybe that people are replying to all on an email list that has wide distribution and are committing all sorts of faux pas as part of their replies. Wouldn’t it be nice to just be able to reply with “unsubscribe” like you could do with listserv and magically have the email replies stop appearing in your inbox?
“Me too” for email chains.
Seems like 80% of an email chain’s replies are saying the exact same thing that someone else said two replies ago. Wouldn’t it be nice if Outlook could figure out that those were “me too” replies and tally them up for the original sender like the poll functionality can do and leave everyone else’s email clean?
Nuvola-like mail internet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Gee, I don’t get enough email these days.” Me neither. Yet, it seems as though any time someone wants you to pay attention to something that they’re doing, they send out not only emails telling you about it, but also emails notifying you about upcoming emails.
I tune into TV series if I want additional suspense in my life. How many of those do I actually watch? Approximately zero, unless I’m coerced by someone else into watching them.
Regardless, I don’t want extra emails in my inbox, especially if they’re emails notifying me of upcoming emails. At some point, you’re going to make me train my spam filter to throw away all emails. Oops. Too late.
Imagine that you, as a developer, are at some stage of the project cycle in a large corporation in which you find yourself not “on time” with your planned “project deliverables.”
You find yourself in a project meeting, and everyone is giving their updates. Then, just like a freak snowstorm for a kid who didn’t study for a big test at school, key project stakeholders get into a heated discussion about a key project requirement.
All of a sudden, you are now able to justify, if only to yourself, that your inability to get to project milestones downstream from this contentious requirement was actually a saving grace of the project. You didn’t burn yourself out on a piece of the puzzle that was going to ultimately be made useless. YOU CAN GO OUT AND PLAY IN THE SNOW BECAUSE SCHOOL IS CANCELED!
But wait… Â You still have that test you didn’t study for, or back in the real world, new project requirements that are to be made downstream from the updated requirements being discussed, and the ultimate release date still won’t budge.
Congratulations. You’ll now have to work 80 hours/week to make up for the major requirements shift. At least you didn’t waste any effort on the original requirements, right?
Is your job your field’s equivalent of disassembling the drainage pipes in the building and cleaning them? Â Is it beneath your skill set?
Pride goeth before the fall.
News flash: No one’s hiring people with PhDs in operating an abacus anymore. The same may go for your skill set, too.
The key thing to remember about crappy assignments is that very few people embrace them well enough to get good at them. Â Yes, it’s true that if you get really good at a job that nobody else wants, you might be assigned to that job for a very long time. Unfortunately, if you do a mediocre or bad job at it, you may not have any job for very long.
Maybe you’ve been assigned this crappy job because people believe that you can turn things around. Do you want to prove people who believe in you wrong?
Maybe you’ve been assigned this crappy job because people expect you to fail. Do you want to prove those people right?
Apparently, conventional wisdom has decided that if you don’t take action, you can’t be blamed for anything:
Sure, you’re about to hit an iceberg. However, if you try to steer the ship, and it ruptures, you’ll be at fault. If you hit the iceberg head on and your ship withstands the hit, you’ll have warded off disaster. If your ship starts going down, well, you can possibly pretend you were unaware of the problem. If you take action, you have to acknowledge the problem.
Why must departmental silos treat problems like toothaches: Because there’s a fear of going to the dentist, everyone waits until the tooth abscesses and a trip to the emergency room and an emergency extraction is needed. A little infection or cavity turned into a week-long course of top-tier antibiotics and a missing tooth.
Maybe everyone’s hoping they’ll be laid off before having to take responsibility for a problem. Â After all, being laid off assumes far less personal responsibility than possibly failing when attempting a fix.
It seems like the greatest skill that many rely on to get through their careers is creative writing.
Most jobs start with a resume, in which you may have to creatively explain how your dark periods, lack of qualifications, and employment gaps don’t make you a less desirable candidate that all the people with creative resumes.
If you’re in a place which provides a peer feedback mechanism, you may need creative writing skills to critique a coworker without completely demolishing that person.
If you’re required to write your own performance appraisal, you will need to strike the balance between accuracy and best story possible. I believe this genre is called “historical fiction”.
Finally, every day you have to respond to an email from a customer or coworker who’s out-of-line, you have to respond creatively.
Forget all the business and formal writing classes. You need well-developed creative writing skills to succeed.
…we judge our past experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. Other information is not lost, but it is not used. This includes net pleasantness or unpleasantness and how long the experience lasted.
…participants had two experiences of immersing one hand in painfully cold water.
The short trial lasted 60 s, with water temperature at 14 °C.
The long trial lasted 90 s; the temperature was 14 °C for
the first 60 s, then rose gradually to 15 °C over the next
30 s–still unpleasant, but a distinct improvement for most
participants.
When they were later given a choice of which
trial to repeat, a significant majority of participants chose to
repeat the long trial. This preference violates logic, because
adding pain to an aversive episode cannot make it better
A Possible Improvement on the Constructive Feedback Technique
Toastmasters uses a sandwich technique [good-bad-good], but the challenge is that the Serial position effect might cause the criticism necessary for improvement to be lost. However, this modified sandwich technique might provide the benefits of offering constructive criticism while still producing a more positive result at the end:
Sandwich Layer: Bread Evaluation Element: Praise – strengths exhibited by the speaker
Sandwich Layer: Condiments
Evaluation Element: Areas for improvement – where can the speaker improve
Sandwich Layer: Meat, cheese, vegetables
Evaluation Element: Specific suggestions – how can the speaker improve
5 minutes travel time/dial-in time/waiting for people to realize their clock is out-of-sync
5 minutes of greetings
2 minutes of status
3 minutes of disconnect beeps or leaving early for a restroom break
Collateral Damage
There’s more to it than that this. Â There is also collateral damage. Â Everyone assumes that calendar openings = free time, so you often end up with every hour filled with at least a half hour meeting.
Appointment Backlog
Half-hour meetings rarely run under on time. Â In fact, the greeting, handshaking, and orientation portion of the meeting may take 10 to 15 minutes, unless you have an incredible facilitator for the meeting. Â Therefore, if the subject matter was worth 30 minutes, the meeting will be closer to 45 minutes in length. Â This expansion of appointment time is similar to the reason why your doctor’s appointment runs an hour behind.
Anticipation Frustration
With good fortune, your hourly half-hour meetings will only take 40-45 minutes, leaving you with free time in between. Â In this space of time you will worry about being prepared for the next meeting, take care of things (like eating) that you’ve not been giving other time for, and sit in the frustration of not being able to start anything in the amount of time you have left.
Action Items
Effective meeting facilitation will draw out a to-do list of action items that are to be resolved outside of the scope of the meeting, often to prevent the delay in their resolution from holding up the meeting itself. In principle, these are effective tools. In practice, combined with fully booked schedules, they can be like spending 8am-5pm working on adding items to your personal to-do list–it just keeps getting bigger.
Compound Multitasking
With the backlog of to-do list items and meetings, people begin doing “other work” in their meetings. Therefore, as meetings themselves impact the productivity of other work, meetings become less productive and end up running longer to get the same amount of work done–a downward spiral of productivity destruction.
. The 
