So it takes a bold character to suggest that what the business world needs is more virtual meetings, but that’s just what Wayne Turmel did on Management Issues recently. Of course, Turmel is a clever guy and aware that his suggestion won’t be popular, so between multiple pleas for patience from his readers, he’s at pains to point out that what he’s advocating isn’t an increase in the total number spent by virtual teams in meetings but a redistribution of meeting time from few long meetings to more, shorter ones.

Why? Turmel says that remote workers have stuck too closely to patterns formed in physical offices since moving their work online. Setting up an in-person meeting is usually a logistical challenge, as multiple schedules need to be coordinated and physical meeting spaces booked. For this reason, traditional meetings are generally infrequent but long in order to accomplish what needs doing when you can actually manage to get everyone together. But this is a flawed approach to virtual meetings, according to Turmel

When people started to do online meetings, they followed the same model, for the same reasons, but there are several fundamental differences between thoughtfully run webmeetings and a traditional meeting:

People’s attention spans are naturally shorter online. Asking someone to sit for a long time in a static environment is going to impact their ability to engage, contribute and add value. You’ll get better work and attention from people who still have some energy and will to live left.

The logistics of setting up a webmeeting (once you master the software, which takes about three practices) are infinitely easier than trying to get everyone physically in the same place at the same time, book an available conference room, and all the other administrivia. It’s also much easier to get 45 minutes out of someone’s day than a couple of hours.

When people don’t have to leave their desks to attend, there’s a lot less wasted time. People can get more work done up to the moment the meeting starts, and pick up where they left off right away.

If the meeting is short and targeted, people will pay attention more.

The logical conclusion of this reasoning for remote workers gathering virtually, according to Turmel, is more meetings of shorter duration. The result will be more engaged meeting attendees, more productivity per meeting minute and a lot less doodling and covert web surfing.

“So put down the torches and pitchforks and let’s examine the notion that more frequent, but shorter and targeted online meetings, might be an option. It’s not like what we’re doing now works so well for most of us,” concludes Turmel.

Do you agree with him that more frequent, shorter virtual meetings might be an improvement on the current way of doing business?

Image courtesy of Flickr user David Recordon.

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The idea behind yaM is to replace more traditional tools, such as an emailed agenda and notes, with a collaborative online tool that provides a centralized place to capture and share all of the information pertaining to the meeting. yaM is designed to be used before, during and after the meeting. Prior to the meeting, the organizer can set up a schedule and agenda and distribute that to the attendees. Each meeting set up on yaM can have a number of pages added to it, with each page containing different tools, including:

• Agenda, minutes, action items and notes. Notes and action items pages can be added to take notes during the meeting, while agenda and minutes pages can be generated automatically.
• Documents and drawings. Documents can be uploaded and shared prior to and during the meeting
• Whiteboard. A collaborative virtual whiteboard to sketch out ideas.
• Analysis and discussion. yaM provides a range of collaborative analysis tools to help  decision-making during the meting, including SWOT, cost-benefit analysis and brainstorming tools.
• Voting. Meeting participants can vote on ideas using the consensus development tool.

Pages can be added on the fly, and all the pages from the meting are archived in the tool, keeping a handy record of meeting outcomes.

yaM is free; you can sign up here.

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There’s a lot of information to digest, so I’ve condensed the juiciest morsels into what I hope is a more accessible short-form. Here goes!

All seven board members were re-elected; there was an advisory vote on executive compensation and Apple’s public accounting firm was chosen (it’s Ernst & Young, by the way.) Votes also were cast on two shareholder proposals. The first called for a published “sustainability report” detailing the company’s environmental policies and its contingency planning in the face of climate change. The second proposal was for the creation of a second board of directors, tasked with overseeing Apple’s environmental policies and business strategy in the face of climate change. The board felt they were already doing a fine job in both these areas, and recommended voting against the new proposals. Votes were counted and, unsurprisingly, neither proposal was successful.

Green

According to Macworld, Jobs claimed that Apple is the first company to work directly with suppliers on issues ranging from environmental impact to worker protection and education. Macworld’s Dan Frakes writes;

Taking a jab at other companies, as well as organizations such as Greenpeace, [Jobs] noted that “other companies just make promises” and attend conferences and events to “schmooze with [environmental groups], but the work ain’t getting done,” whereas Apple is actually taking steps to improve the company’s real-world green credentials and treatment of workers.

Jobs also noted that the smaller packaging used across Apple’s product line has reduced the number of annual cargo flights “by the hundreds”;

“It’s the right thing to do from an environmental point of view; it’s the right thing to do from a business point of view.”

Money

In its first quarter 2010 investor conference call, Apple announced it had $39.8 billion in the bank at the end of December 2009. The question now is, what on earth should it do with it? Spend it? Save it for the next recession? Perhaps pay dividends to shareholders — something BusinessWeek says the company has not done since 1995? Jobs said;

We know if we need to acquire something – a piece of the puzzle to make something big and bold – we can write a check for it and not borrow a lot of money and put our whole company at risk. The cash in the bank gives us tremendous security and flexibility.

You never know what opportunities are going to be around the next corner. We are a large enough business now that, in order to really move the needle, we have to be thinking pretty bold – pretty large.

New Role

On the matter of Apple’s new role as a ‘mobile devices’ company (first announced by Jobs in January and reiterated by Tim Cook in last month’s earnings call) Jobs said;

This is not something that we’re ordaining from the top. This is something our customers are saying with their dollars, if you just look at the products that we’re selling. They’re telling us what they think is important and we’re reflecting that.

But specifically, what does this mean about the future of Apple’s desktop Macs, the iMac and Mac Pro? “We love desktop computers,” El Jobso assured the shareholders, “And plan to continue making them.” So, that’s alright then.

Asia

When asked about Apple’s efforts to increase international sales, Jobs turned to (VP of Retail) Ron Johnson, who announced that Apple is looking to open 24 more stores in China to join the existing store in Beijing. This is to be expected, given how important (and lucrative) China is to Apple. DigitalDaily’s John Paczkowski writes, “Mac sales in China increased nearly 100 percent year over year in the first financial quarter of 2010… while iPhone sales [are] ramping up.”

Apple's Beijing Store

Beyond the Mac, Paczkowski quotes Tim Cook on Apple’s overall revenue in that market;

“…if you look at greater China last quarter, which is China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, our revenues tripled year-over-year… We have a tremendous focus on it.”

I guess it’s only right China should get a little Apple-love… after all, they make most of Apple’s gear in the first place!

Stability

Finally, there was a moment of fun, Jobs-style; a shareholder wanted to know of Jobs, “What keeps you up at night?”

“Shareholder meetings,” Jobs immediately shot back, before getting very serious and adding, thoughtfully;

“Apple requires stability in the world. People aren’t going to worry about which laptop to buy if they can’t afford dinner, can’t afford to send their kids to school, can’t afford textbooks. There are things much bigger than us that are out of our control. So we try to just do the best we can.”

Bravo, Steve. And bravo, Apple.

I’d prepared detailed questions about the project, set a timer on my computer so I was ready to expect the call, and had my project notes handy. I was all ready to go. Unfortunately, the team wasn’t, and the meeting was almost a complete failure!

Here’s a quick refresher on the ingredients for a successful phone conference.

Timing

As I was readying myself for the call, the team leader sent me an SMS to let me know that the project manager was stuck in another meeting. That is understandable, but the problem was that I had another meeting immediately after the conference. I told the team leader this so that she knew, and she hurried the project manager straight into the teleconference when the other meeting ended.

These kinds of eventualities can’t always be avoided, but if you’ve scheduled a phone conference with someone, it’s important to be on time, especially when some (or all) attendees are working remotely, and there’s no face-to-face opportunities to appease them.

In my experience, if the person who called a phone conference is running late, people will drop out of the conference much more quickly than they’d drop out of an on-site meeting. If you want to run your meeting, be there and be punctual.

Technology

When the team leader called me, the PM by her side, we experienced some major connection issues, which were perpetrated by their speakerphone.

Sometimes, connectivity issues can be impossible to predict, but it’s a good idea to check out your equipment and make sure it works before you try to use it in a meeting. In the end, it took three calls and a switch of speakerphone for our teleconference to get under way.

Preparation

Once the meeting kicked off, I started working through each of the questions I had about the project. The more specific my questions grew, the more apparent it became that my team members didn’t have their project documentation in front of them. In the end, they asked me to wait while they grabbed it, so they could answer my questions.

I started to get the idea that this project wasn’t anywhere near the top of my team members’ priority lists, so I began to consider shifting it further down my own. But their lack of focus also reduced my faith in them, so in the end I decided to step through the entire project with them so that I could confirm all the details, rather than just those I’d been especially uncertain of.

It’s rarely sufficient to just roll up to a meeting with the documentation in hand. You need to have read it and understood it if your teleconference is going to be a success and the other attendees are to respect you — and the priority you’ve given to the issues under discussion.

Follow Up

I was so unconvinced by my teammates’ performance in the teleconference that when it was over, I wrote up the decisions we’d made in the meeting and sent them through for the team to approve. This way, I felt I’d at least covered all my bases: If the team decided later that they didn’t like where the project was heading, or they hadn’t considered all the information, at least I’d have this emailed agreement as a justification for more time or budget for the project.

I think it’s always a good idea to follow up any teleconference with minutes or contact notes, just so you can ensure everyone’s on the same page. But it’s imperative when decisions are hard to reach, the outcomes of the meeting aren’t clear, or team members want to make note of any reservations or conditions they tabled.

What’s your recipe for a successful phone conference?

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But working with such a team can be maddening. How do you tame the time zone madness and plan your meetings as efficiently as possible?

Give your team at least two options of meeting times to choose from. In one of the first virtual teams I worked with, our team leader would ask us if a specific conference time was okay for everyone. Naturally, there was never unanimous agreement. This led to several messages of, “When are you available, then?” sent back and forth to various members of the team. What a waste of time! By giving the team several choices, you’ll make it easier on yourself to set the meeting time. You could also use one of the many meeting scheduling tools that we’ve covered here on WWD. Good options to try are TimeBridge, When Is Good and MeetingMade.

Use a tool that automatically converts time zones for each participant. Automating this part prevents human error, which is likely to come when forgetting DST (Daylight Saving Time) rules or faulty counting. Tools such as The World Clock Meeting Planner and Google Calendar might help. You can also try Permatime, which Mike reviewed in a previous post. Some scheduling tools, like MeetingMade, also automatically handle timezones.

Rotate the “awkward” time slots. It’s possible that a few members of your team will have to wake up a little earlier or stay up later than usual just to participate. If this is the case, make sure that you rotate the people who receive awkward time slots. Don’t let one or two people frequently carry the burden of deviating from their regular body rhythms.

Have a clear agenda ahead. By writing down a specific agenda, you can pinpoint the reason why you’re having a meeting in the first place. Having an agenda also prevents you from wasting the time of the participants who aren’t essential to the meeting. If their input is hardly needed in the discussion, then their availability or promptness shouldn’t be a priority.

Make sure that all participants can understand or access the tools you’ll be using. This may seem like simplistic advice, but some tech savvy web workers forget that not everyone knows how to use even the most common web apps. I once worked with a colleague who didn’t have a Skype account, so I had to walk him through signing up for one and testing his sound equipment.

To avoid wasting time, look for existing help pages, video instructions, and other resources that your colleagues can use in their own time. It usually helps to send these links to everyone involved, as a group, so that it doesn’t look like you’re singling anyone out.

Ask for feedback. At the end of the first meeting, send out a short questionnaire to your team, asking for their feedback. Cover all the important bases from sound quality to the faithfulness of the meeting to the agenda. The comments and suggestions you’ll receive will come in handy when planning your next meeting.

Planning a meeting with your global team doesn’t have to be that hard. With the right tools and a fair, efficient approach, it might become as easy as planning a face-to-face meeting with colleagues from a nearby building.

If you’re looking for more meeting pointers, check out Simon’s post “7 Tips for More Efficient Meetings” — the guidelines in there apply to virtual meetings just as much as regular “in the flesh” meetings.

How do you plan meetings with a global team? Share your tips in the comments.

Image by stock.xchng user g-point

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Here’s a screencast showing MeetingMade being used to set up a meeting:

WWD Screencast: MeetingMade from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

The interface is very easy to use, which is important in a tool like this as there’s no point in sending out a meeting request using a scheduling tool only to get an email back when the recipient can’t figure out how to use it. Only the meeting organizer neds to have a MeetingMade account.

MeetingMade also distinguishes itself from the crowd of meeting scheduling apps by being able to handle partial availability and timezones. MeetingMade uses the iCalendar email standard so meeting requests from the app will work with most calendaring apps like Microsft Outlook, Google Calendar  and Apple iCal.

MeetingMade is free to use while it’s in beta (it will move to paid subscription at some point in the future), and is worth checking out if you’re looking for a meeting scheduler.

What meeting scheduling tool do you use?

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As web workers, we probably have to endure meetings less often than our cube-dwelling counterparts. When you do hold a meeting with a client or with your teammates, either face-to-face or as a teleconference, you want to make it as effective as possible so you get the outcomes that you want, without wasting anyone’s time.

Here are some tips for making sure that your meetings are less of a chore, go smoothly and have outcomes that are favorable for everyone.

Decide if the meeting is required

My No. 1 meeting rule is not to waste anyone’s time. Companies hold too many meetings. Don’t hold the meeting if you don’t need to or just because you’ve held meetings for this purpose before. Can you achieve the same outcome via more efficient means instead; maybe through a phone call or email?

Decide what type of meeting you are holding

Seth Godin wrote this week that there are three types of meeting:

1. Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it’s primarily designed to inform.
2. Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
3. Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.

There is a danger of meetings suddenly changing from one type to another, during the meeting, without everyone being aware of it. You need to decide what type of meeting you are holding and make sure everyone knows what it is beforehand.

Have an agenda and stick to it

Nothing is more frustrating than a meeting that has no clear purpose and meanders from topic to topic. All meetings should have an agenda distributed to all attendees beforehand so that you know what you’re going to be discussing and deciding upon. Everyone needs to be aware of what they should bring to the meeting so that they don’t feel ambushed on the day. Finally, an agenda is not clearly defined if it has “Any Other Business” on it.

Only invite people to the meeting who need to be there

People should only be invited to the meeting if they are required — if they will have important input or be involved in decision-making. Be rigorous when pruning the list of invitations: attendees who don’t feel like they are contributing or required will be bored, resentful and inattentive. It’s OK to have people only attend for the part of the meeting that they’re needed for.

Have someone chair the meeting

This may feel stuffy and formal, but with no chairperson, you’ll have a hard time making sure that the meeting sticks to to the agenda. The chairperson should also ensure that everyone contributes.

Start on time and do not overrun

People are giving up valuable time out of their working day for the meeting. Therefore it is vital that meetings start on time and do not overrun: this is the chairperson’s responsibility. If you cannot finish your meeting on time, you should schedule another.

Follow up afterwards

It’s important to follow up afterwards. Thank everyone for their time, distribute outcomes and action points as appropriate.

These tips should also work well for teleconferences. For some teleconference-specific pointers, check out 27 Tips for Teleconferencing.

What tips do you use for holding an effective meeting?

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The annual Apple shareholders meeting had a different tone than usual on Wednesday, lacking the presence of company CEO Steve Jobs. The Apple board hasn’t had a straightforward year, leading the company through a global financial crisis and aiming to stem the ongoing investor uncertainty surrounding Steve Jobs’ health.

Shareholders seemed to embrace the positive on the whole, wishing Jobs a Happy Birthday (he turned 54 on Tuesday) and offering mixed opinion on how the board handled disclosing information surrounding recent events.

A Healthy CEO

As expected, a great deal of time and attention was given to Steve Jobs. As the man who has provided visionary leadership for the company in recent years, to many he is a vital member of the Apple corporate machine. His announcement of escalating health concerns last month caused a stir in the technology press, with rumors about his condition changing every day. Thankfully, this has now settled down as people have come to realize that Apple won’t collapse without his presence.

Shareholders approached the board with a mix of acceptance that personal matters need to be kept private, and questions of whether enough information has been provided. According to Fortune, they were in good enough spirit to sing Happy Birthday and wish him well.

Comments from an Apple shareholder for 20 years, Roland Quintero of Palo Alto, Calif., summarized the general consensus well:

The problem is between corporate and personal responsibility. Anything Apple says would affect the market. The board’s decision reflects a desire to maintain stability and market share. As a shareholder, I, personally, would like to know more, but I understand the no-win situation the company is in.

It’s good to see that shareholders do accept that a level of privacy is needed, both for the sake of Jobs and his family, and also to preserve a stable share price for the company. As the months without Jobs tick by (and software/hardware releases keep coming), Apple seems to be coping very well with Tim Cook temporarily running the company. It would be great to see Jobs back and fighting fit in the future, but this stint without him should go a long way towards showing that Apple has the internal vision and direction to continue innovating without him at the helm.

Re-electing the Board

The shareholders made the decision to re-elect the entire Apple board of 8 people, including former vice president Al Gore and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Votes were taken on four proposals to change shareholder say on executive compensation, increase required company disclosure and alter staff healthcare provision, but none were passed.

The decision to retain all board members demonstrates a show of support on behalf of the shareholders, and a belief that the company is still being lead by those with the knowledge and expertise to ensure future success. It’s exactly what Apple needed to retain stability and confidence in otherwise turbulent times.

In typical secret fashion, Apple prohibited attendees from carrying mobile or communications devices into the shareholder meeting, to ensure that information wasn’t misinterpreted or leaked during the presentation. Despite this, a few tweets did manage to leak out while the meeting was in progress.

Dividend Payments

Questions surrounded dividend payments, with hopes from shareholders that a portion of Apple’s extensive cash balance would be used to reward those investing in the company. Apple held over $25 billion in cash at the end of the most recent quarter, the second largest cash level among high-tech companies.

With many companies struggling financially at present, Apple would appear to be in a strong position to continue operations as normal, along with pumping money into research and development. With any luck, they’ll come out of the current recession with an ever-improving hardware and software lineup. On the whole, the re-election of the board and wishes for Steve Jobs’ return to good health bode well for the company.

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After our first week proper in 2009, we’ve run smack-bang in to a hurricane of Apple news courtesy of this year’s Macworld event.

Over at Apple’s final MacWorld Keynote, standing in for Papa Jobs, Uncle Phil unveiled brand new iLife and iWork suites, alongside completing the Macbook Pro lineup with a 17″ model touting 8 hours of battery life.

And, to finish proceedings off, Apple revealed special singing guest Tony Bennett, allowing the adoring audience to bask in the warmth of his orange glow as he crooned the keynote to a close.

While everyone else at TheAppleBlog has had their eye on Macworld, I’ve been rolling around in the App Store and getting friendly with the latest additions.

This week I’ve been looking at Keynote Remote, Wallpaper Notes, Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Bank Panic.

Keynote Remote ($0.99)
If you’re passionate and prepared, presenting can be a true pleasure. Keynote, being the polished application that it is, makes both preparation and execution a breeze. When I present, the Apple Remote is a key tool: enabling me to present in a fluid and relaxed manner. Using the Remote, I’m not looking at a screen or even notes, I’m looking at — and engaging with — the audience. If you want your presentations to be more effective, don’t bother with this app, go back to basics — learn your subject inside out, practice, relax and, on the day, enthuse.

Wallpaper Notes ($0.99)
Apple’s embedded Notes app is already out-dated; there’s no desktop or web sync, no reminders functionality, no bells and a distinct absence of whistles. I replaced Notes with Evernote, which incorporates a cavalcade of note-taking features. Wallpaper Notes does nothing special, bar one killer feature: saving notes as iPhone wallpaper, meaning that a quick check of the screen keeps you informed. A cunning work-around indeed.

Cisco WebEx Meeting Center (free)
Back when I worked for the European-arm of an American mobile media publisher, I learnt two important things: a white vest and organic American Apparel underwear are only ever acceptable work-wear when working from home, and, when we conducted large-scale meetings with our cousins ‘cross the pond, Cisco’s WebEx was an invaluable tool in bringing us together. Long-awaited by iPhone-touting business folk, this mobile implementation of WebEx incorporates audio-visual presentations and even chat functionality.

Bank Panic ($0.99)
It’s a morbidly apt premise for a simple iPhone game and I love it: bankrupt stock brokers have taken to hurling themselves out of high-rises due to the global financial crisis. It’s your job to stop the depressed Dow dealers snapping their supple skulls on the hard floor by catching their falling bodies in your miracle blanket. Now if this deliciously horrid plot wasn’t reason enough to purchase the game, here’s the really clever bit: the game’s difficulty is linked to the real-world value of the Dow Jones — the lower the Dow drops, the tougher the gameplay gets.

Just One More Thing

It seems that this week’s Roundup has been of a decidedly productive nature, covering tools for meetings, note-taking and presenting. Even Bank Panic has serious under-currents with its amusing use of the declining Dow Jones feeding the stock-brokers’ suicide rate.

So it’s time we lighten the mood a little as, like Sauron’s great big burning eye in the sky, I’m going to turn my cyclopean gaze to the future and draw your attention to a very promising iPhone game due out soon.

Bovine Dragon Software are the designers behind Trace, an inventive game that involves drawing the platforms that your character traverses in each stage, released last year. About to pop its youngling head out from the womb of development is Bovine Dragon’s latest creation, Gomi.

From the cutesy preview videos, it seems that Gomi is a mash-up of Mario Galaxy, Katamari Damacy and LocoRoco, wrapped in graphics that look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint. According to the developers, the eco-friendly, grinning Gomi will be out by February, in the meantime, check out the videos to see the game in action.

Over the course of the holiday season, I decided to invest in Gameloft’s Uno for iPhone. The game is bug-ridden, clunky and slow, certainly not worth the five bucks I paid for it. And I should have known better – I’ve previously worked for a big mobile publisher and developer, based on my own experience and general industry chit-chat with my peers, I know exactly what goes in to the development of these games.

Perhaps it’s an effort to appease the needs of licensors, or to hit unrealistic release dates promised by uncommunicative marketing and sales departments, maybe it’s to please investors (who are often shielded from a proper overview of the business by misguided MDs) or it’s as distasteful as knowingly rushing a title out with a recognizable logo pasted on to it (that acts as a horridly misleading seal of quality), there are a multitude of possible reasons as to why games from the big developers and publishers are often offensively shoddy disappointments.

I’ll summarize my point as such: look at Tapulous, Hand Circus and Illusion Labs –  bastions of quality independent development. It’s time the big guys started taking notes from the little guys.

That’s all from the App Store for this week, I’m quitting my jibber jabber for another 7 days and I’ll be back next Saturday with more apps. In the meantime, drop by the comments and let me know what apps you’ve been looking at.

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As an IT teleworker for a large company over the past 10 years, I’ve spent my share of time on conference calls. The other day, in fact, I set a personal record with 11.5 hours of them in a single work day (and I had the sore headphone ear and hoarse voice that came along with that feat). Despite this meeting load, I still had to respond to IM’s, reply to a multitude of emails, prepare slides early in the day for a presentation later on, and a host of other tasks. That begs the question:

How do you effectively multitask in meetings in a way that lets you get work done?

When you can and when you can’t

First, you have to recognize where the multitasking opportunities are. Obviously, when you are presenting a set of slides or walking through some code to an audience, doing anything else is next to impossible. On the other end of the spectrum, if you were invited to provide details that might not even get covered to a broad group, there’s a decent chance you won’t say anything beyond introducing yourself at the top of the meeting.

Pay particular attention to the agenda shown at the beginning of the meeting. If you don’t have a copy of it, take a quick screen shot of it when it flashes by on whatever desktop sharing mechanism you are using if you can, as that will be your roadmap to multitasking potential. Take note not only of the segments where your opinion might possibly come up, but also be sure to mentally check back into the meeting every 2-3 minutes so you can assess where in the agenda things stand. That decreases the chances you’ll be caught off guard by a question when you weren’t paying attention because you were doing something else.

Short Tasks

David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to task management is ideal for meeting multitasking since it breaks things down into short time segments. In using this method, whenever something comes into your inbox you assess whether or not it is something you need to keep for reference, something you can delete, something you can delegate to someone else, something you can take care of in less than 2 minutes, or something that needs a longer period of your time. Everything except that last category can be processed in the 2-3 minute time slice you create for yourself during portions of your meeting that aren’t as relevant to you as other segments.

Whatever task management tactics you use, there are always quick hitting items that need attention. Taking care of them while on a meeting where you can multitask keeps them from intimidatingly piling up.

Stop and Start Tasks

Some longer tasks lend themselves to being stopped and started in manageable intervals that can match up with those 2-3 minute segments you’ve carved out for yourself while the meeting is going on. Maybe you have some long technical article to read through that lends itself to stopping every few paragraphs to check back in with your teleconference. When a slide presentation needs to be prepared for later in the day, stopping after each slide is done so you can assess how far the meeting has progressed is another example.

Small Physical Tasks

Paper filing, desk cleaning, reloading your beverage if you have a wireless phone — these things are primarily physical rather than mental, and lend themselves to being done while you listen to your meeting. That’s not to say you should go dig the ditch for a new sprinkler line in your back yard while on the phone, but smaller things around the desk are ripe for multitasking.

What to do when you get caught

Make no mistake, if you frequently try to multitask during meetings you will eventually get caught. Someone will ask you a question and, because you were off multitasking, you won’t know what that question was. There are good and bad ways to recover from this situation.

Some will tell you to feign ignorance (“I don’t quite understand what you mean, can you rephrase the question?”). Others will tell you to pass the buck to someone else on the call (“I’m not quite the expert on that topic that Anakin is, what do you think Ani?”) However, the best way is to simply cop to it, but be careful about how you choose your words. There is a big difference between:

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, can you repeat that?”

and

“I’m afraid you caught me multitasking on something else for a meeting with my boss later today, can you repeat that?”

Both make you look bad, but the latter makes you look less bad. And that’s the risk you run when trying to multitask: the possibility you could look bad on your current meeting weighed against the cost of not getting as many things done throughout your business day. If you approach multitasking opportunities with a plan, though, you can mitigate that risk and be more productive.

Pete Johnson created one of the first web applications ever built inside Hewlett Packard during the mid 1990′s and has had the good fortune to work with over 400 engineers all over the world, write articles for a variety of publications, and present topics at trade shows. He served as the HP.com Chief Architect for two and a half years before a reorganization brought him his present responsibilities as the Marketing and Internet Platform Services IT, Portals and Applications Chief Architect (try fitting that on a business card). He blogs about how improved non-technical skills can accelerate technical careers at http://nerdguru.net.

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