Had a good, productive Maram meeting with Meghan O’Shea and Pamela Penney. We spent a little time reviewing Discord and Trello, and are now going to try to get the rest of the core admin team onboarded to those project management systems.
It was a working meeting, so instead of just talking about what we were going to do and making to-do lists, I was trying to actually do some of the things as we went — if I was supposed to e-mail someone, I often started adding it to the to-do list, and then stopped myself, and just sent the e-mail instead.
This is a relatively new practice for me, and something I’ve mostly picked up from the working meetings of the Sigiriya team, who are overall 1-2 decades younger than me, and who often have their laptops out during the meeting and are actively working on tasks while also planning, discussing, etc.
It sounds chaotic, and it is a little, esp. if people are also answering e-mail or otherwise a little distracted during the meeting. Sometimes you have to catch someone’s attention and repeat yourself, because they were typing something about a previous item, or about something that just occurred to them.
But nonetheless, I actually think a lot more gets done than in the more traditional old-style meetings, which were more about making plans for what you were, in theory, going to do later. Especially useful for people who tend towards procrastination and/or overcommitment, perhaps.
Slowly, slowly, the children drag us into the future. 🙂