Once a week we use the miracle of Voice over IP to stay in touch with the rest of the team.
During the week we are pretty much in constant contact with a IM-type chat room which logs all conversations and allows scrolling back through history but there’s something solid and real about talking to people.
We talk, we joke, we take some minutes and action items and for a split second we’re back in corporate land. But we have a timeline, we’re meeting from 9 pm to 10 pm and we’re doig this in addition to the day job.
One thing that resounded around the echo chamber recently was the expressed desire to be doing this full time, for the day job, rather than as we are. That really means taking it to the next step. And beyond.
We have the Subversion server set up, Trac too. We’re working on the new web site and online store. It’s all so exciting.
Doug Copeland wrote
Here’s my theory about meetings and life; the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic—they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be.
37signals expounds on the “meetings are evil” meme in their blog and get a few cracks about them in their book, Getting Real.
They often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense
(I do wish that moron was not me!)
Meetings do generally suck, especially at big companies who use conference calls as a way of filling the time in for overpaid project managers with nothing else to do.
What do you want out of meetings?
Here’s my quick list:
- Everyone turns up on time
- We start off with a positive note.
- When the time spent in the meeting loses quality, it’s time to stop.
- Meetings should be less than 1 hour. Less than 30 mins ideally
I think we manage most of this. We had a lot to talk about this week, 1 week after we turned things on their heads and decided to start working as a group of 4. To some this fulfills a dream of working for their own software company, to others it represented a pension. In one week we’ve had some amazing work done including the creation of an entire product (isn’t Objective C with Cocoa amazing?)
Now, it’s late. Sayonara!