Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

  Ah meetings. The bane of all our lives. Some are useful, others...less so. But the perception has always been that they get in the way of doing our real jobs. Yet they are a necessary evil - used well, they allow information to flow between people and allow discussion to happen. Before I go on, I should point out that no, this is not another article about how to make your meetings run better, how to write a better agenda (you  are  all creating an agenda for your meetings, aren't you?) and so on. Enough has been written about that already. What I'd like to share today is a calendar hack that I find useful to tame that most annoying and insidious habit to become widespread since we have gone online -  back to back online meetings . Since 2020, when Covid forced us into the most extensive remote working experiment ever, I have noticed a trend throughout industry to book meetings into every slot, one after another. Days like that are exhausting, and people have to dis...

This article has been bubbling under for a while, triggered when I stumbled across this Twitter thread making some predictions about the near future of work. The ideas resonated with me, but this tweet in particular caught my eye: " what companies think hybrid work is and what workers think it is are two different things " I am already seeing evidence that this prediction is coming true. " Hybrid Working " is such a loaded term that misunderstandings are inevitable. Yet it is still being sold as the “best of both worlds” (office and remote) even though it is likely to become the worst of both unless companies handle things very carefully indeed. As the pandemic restrictions are eased, this will become more and more important. Before looking at how best to handle hybrid working patterns, what is it exactly? And what might the options be? "Hybrid" seems to be best defined as some people working in the office some of the time. This definition is fine, but i...