Office Etiquette: Meetings

In an attempt to limit the amount of unnecessary time in the office, it seems there should be some general rules or considerations made when it comes to working with others. In this particular entry I will provide my insights and "resolutions" for the year 2011 in the way of work related meetings.

Some general personal guidelines/rules that I follow:

• Do NOT schedule or accept same day meeting requests. Take the time to plan and be courteous to other people's time.
  
• Meeting coordinator should always take control of the meeting and don't allow those joining late to make those that were able to join the meeting on time to hear a recap of the entire meeting.
• Passive participation in meetings that have more than 8-10 people. Meetings that have more than 8-10 people are ineffective.
  
• When joining a meeting, especially late, have the courtesy to wait for an appropriate break to announce you have joined. Seriously... is it that you are that oblivious, rude, or full of yourself that you feel that everyone must know that you have joined regardless of what the current conversation is?
• Conference calls are a pain, if you have a group in a conference room, be aware of the conference room logistics, background noise, etc.

General meeting tips:

• Meetings should have a goal or purpose
• Meetings should have an agenda
• Be deliberate in your choice of invitees
  
• Meetings should always have meeting minutes. If people are going to take the time to attend and participate in the meeting, the coordinator should respect this by providing minutes to recap the meeting.
  
• Sensitivity to everyone's time and ensure to optimize the time allocated. In other words, don't spend a lot of time with small talk, stay on track with the agenda, and certainly end the meeting when the goals have been accomplished.
  

Social Apps

I am trying to figure out the "sweet spot" for all of the various social media applicaitons. Obviously Facebook has taken the Internet by storm as has Twitter. I am an avid Google / Gmail user, so I am interested in using Google's Buzz, but I'm struggling with the value-add. The only additional "value-add" of Linked-In is the ability to separate personal from work related... Now, if I can just seemlessly integrate them all, I would be happy. I'm also trying to figure out if people are really getting tweets sent to their phones, or if they are generally logging into the site to view updates.

It seems there are a few categories that can used to group these is:
- Blogs: Interactive method to keep an online journal of thoughts and look for feedback.
- Wiki: More of a dialog / lecture, that I think of being used to convey information, but not necessarily look for or receive feedback.
- News: Pushed by things such as RSS or Google Reader, or pulled by an individual to consume, but not necessarily interact with the source of information
- Social broadcasting: A method to simply provide a statement of what are recent activities, with the potential of interaction (i.e., Linked In and Facebook)

Tool & Utilities

Delicious - Great browser bookmarking tool that will allow you to store browser links centrally. By tagging, this tool has helped me better manage links based on relevant free-form categories that are most likely to make sense to me. In addition to this, it introduced me to the concept of "social bookmarking". There are plugins for many common browers. I have had no issues using this service with IE, Firefox, or Chrome.

Stumble Upon - This service allows the user to pick from a variety of categories. Once your profile is setup, a button that is added to your browser can be clicked to send you to a random page that is relevant based on your preliminary profile setup. Once you see the site you get sent to, you have the option of voting a "like" or "dislike" that should help refine future links.

Evernote - I have only recently started using this utility. The premise that interests me is the ability to take notes from just about any device (i.e., my laptop, desktop, or Android based phone). The classifications and organization capabilities on the site seem very flexible. I am looking forward to using this tool more day to day and have additional information to share.