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According to an article at VNUnet, long and pointless meetings are the principal cause of anger in European offices.

“When ..control is lost through external events such as a rude boss, sitting in a pointless meeting or a printer jam that no one wants to fix, it doesn’t take much for the average office worker to snap. There is no doubt that office rage is on the increase, but a range of initiatives such as crisper meetings or interpersonal kindness could reduce stress levels and even extend the life expectancy of office equipment.’ Beresford recommended several tips for helping to reduce office rage, including cutting the length and frequency of meetings and ensuring a specific agenda.”

Reading that made me think that, although quite a few things drive me crazy, one thing that doesn’t is meetings.  The thing is that, although we have quite a lot of them, we’re quite disciplined and use our Workplace tools to help us.

Here’s our Best Practice on how to set up and conduct a meeting - straight out of Workplace..

Policy
All meetings or workshops must be effective and efficient. They must run on time, to an agenda and have the relevant people participating. The salient points to consider are:-

Arranging a Meeting

• All meetings at PlusNet should be booked in Meeting Manager. When booking meetings ensure that your intended attendees are not already booked in another meeting at that time.
• When raising a meeting in Meeting Manager ensure that the agenda is clear and that any preparation work that attendees are expected to carry out prior to the meeting is clearly defined in Meeting Manager, although it is the responsibility of all meeting attendees to be prepared and raise questions before the meeting if additional clarification is required.
• When selecting the duration of the meeting, always consider the length of time you are booking the meeting for. Do you really need to book the room for an hour? Often, a meeting will grow to fill the duration you have booked the room for, therefore try to minimize the length of time you book a room for and stick to the agenda throughout the meeting.
• Whenever you are invited to a meeting you should always question whether you are really required to attend. Has somebody else been invited that can attend on your behalf and update you later? If you feel you are not required, go speak to the person who arranged the meeting and arrange to have yourself taken off the list of attendees.

Conducting a Meeting

• The meeting chair should arrive at the meeting room 5 mins prior to the meeting starting in order to set up Meeting Manager and any other Workplace or required documents.
• The attendees should arrive a few minutes prior to the start of the meeting to get themselves settled and be ready to start promptly.
• The meeting chair should commence the meeting with a statement as to the aims of the meeting. This is to ensure that all parties are aligned to the same objective.
• The meeting chair should drive the meeting, ensuring that the agenda is stuck to and that none of the discussion goes off track. If discussion does go off track, the chair should encourage the distracted parties to arrange a separate workshop if necessary – including creating an action if deemed necessary.
• All agreed actions that arise from a meeting should be accountably added as tasks through Meeting Manager.
• All meetings should end 5 mins prior to the end of the booked period to enable the chair of any meeting following yours to prepare for his/her meeting.

After a Meeting
When exiting the meeting room, it is the chair’s responsibility to ensure that the lights and projector are turned off and that all cups, plates, paper and any other items are removed.

So, you see, if I don’t need to attend a meeting I can always send someone else 

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I had cause tonight to write a document that I’ll need to share with a couple of members of staff in the PlusNet office on Monday, and thought that I’d be best do it in a Word Document (it’s quite long, unfortunately!)

Personally, I’m a cheap-skate (I am Scottish after all ;-)) so I don’t have Microsoft Office. When thinking about installing OpenOffice on to my PC (haven’t needed it since upgrading) I decided that it might be better if I decided to embrace ‘Web 2.0′ and make use of Google Docs.

This may seem surprising, as some people will know that I don’t actually like Gmail. As a Mail client, I hate it - it just doesn’t work for me, yet for other people it works great and they use it over any desktop client etc. This made me slightly wary of using Google Docs as it was probably going to be likely that I’d not like that either.

I duly logged in, was presented with the WYSIWYG editor for my Document, and started typing away. 2 hours later, and I’ve written about 75% of version 0.1 of the document (why’s it always much easier to write documents when you have no word limit - I always used to struggle with Uni essays!), and I have actually enjoyed using Google Docs. I did find it slightly annoying that I couldn’t make my table centre on the page, but since I usually struggle to get Open Office to do what I want when it comes to tables, I can live with that.

The other good thing is that, when the document is complete, I have the option to export it to a Word Document, Open Office Document, PDF or even a Webpage — or I could just email the Google Docs link to the person that’ll be getting the document in the first place and (it would appear) they’ll be able to view it and collaborate on it with me.

I think I’m slowly adapting to these new fangled web apps… after insisting I was on Web 0.1 for months

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Internally at PlusNet, we make use of Wiki’s for storing some of our internal documentation and notes. I recently had to complete some documentation within the Wiki, regarding the new webmail platform that was built.

You might thing this seemed like a simple task, which admittedly, if I was wanting to just do a completely plain text page - but I needed to include some markup, including some internal links, some plain text and some emphasis. However, I was soon to realise that this wasn’t the case…

Being someone who generally uses HTML and Forum Software, I’d have expected to have <b> or [b] to make text bold… but no, MediaWiki makes use of ”’bold”’ to produce bold text. Now, it may just be me, but isn’t that rather unintuitive? Given the popularity of Wiki’s, maybe it is just me and I’m “set in my ways” given the popularity (and usefulness) of site’s like WikiPedia - where many other people seem to keep cope with them fine.

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Here are some links I’ve collected in my travels. I’ll try and make these posts a regular thing. Enjoy.

35 Designers x 5 Questions - Top designers answer 5 questions about design, css, fonts, design books & magazines. Makes for some inspirational reading.

Jacob Nielsen on Command Links - As the boundaries between the web and desktop become increasingly blurred, what is the difference between links and buttons?

HTML 5 - In a surprise move, the WHATWG and W3C kiss and make up. Which can only be a good thing for the rest of us.

The demise of technical writing - Nobody needs writers of instruction manuals in a world where things are so easy to use that nobody needs instruction manuals at all! If only.

The $100 laptop - it weighs 1.5kg, it’s waterproof, it runs for 10 hours on one battery, it has a bigger screen and 3 times the wifi range of my current laptop… at a 10th of the price. Seriously impressive.

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I was at the FOWD yesterday with Matt, Spence, Wojtek and Dean. It was great to see so many leaders in the field gathered in one place but it didn’t inspire me as much as FOWA back in February. There was too much Flash, graphics and animation for my liking. I would have preferred more down-to-earth design ideas.

Like Dean, I enjoyed the Adobe talk about Apollo. It’s gonna be cool to write proper programs without learning C++! Nat Hunter from Airside gave a great little talk about design across different media with reference to her work with Lemon Jelly for their CDs & live shows. Rei Inamoto from AKQA showed off some incredibly creative promotional work while tying it in with 5 sound design principles:

1. Have a point of view - being everything to everyone leaves you with nothing
2. Be who you are - don’t pretend to be someone that you’re not
3. Let them engage with you – give them something meaningful to do
4. Be relevant - prove yourself worthy in whatever medium you work with
5. Simplify Simplify Simplify

I would have liked to hear more from Ryan Singer of 37Signals who did a short and sweet talk on signup forms. We’ve greatly improved our signup process but there’s still room for further improvement. Another brilliant but sadly truncated talk came from Steve Pearce of Poke but as the end of the day grew near, much of what he said went in one ear and out the other… It made me laugh on the way though
All in all a very worthwhile exercise.

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Well, we launched it, and as of right now, we have ~139 accounts registered on community.plus.net. We’ve just got to keep it developing and interesting for people.

Unfortunately, Colin is off up North this next week, visiting his folks and going to watch a football game. Oh well! Still, gives me lots of time to plot new features and do some research.

So, people! Keep suggesting features, finding bugs and posting about them in the forums. Comment on blog posts too to encourage us to write more!

Ciao.

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I was on the Firefox Addons site just now. I clicked on the search box in the header and it expanded to twice its length. “Neat!” I thought to myself and then i realised I had forgotten what I wanted to search for!

The expanding search box is intended to increase usability but it surprised me and in the end made my task more difficult. So is it good or bad?

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