Everything is a video call
Nineteen hours in one week. Eleven of them replaced conversations that used to take two minutes.
19 hours, last week. I counted because it felt wrong, and then counting made it feel worse.
The interesting number isn’t the 19 though. It’s that maybe 11 of those hours were conversations that, in February, would have happened by me turning round and saying “quick one” and getting an answer in 90 seconds.
Those conversations didn’t stop existing. They got a calendar invite.
The dropdown decides how long it takes
Here’s the mechanism, and once I saw it I couldn’t stop seeing it.
A conversation at a desk is exactly as long as it needs to be. You ask, they answer, you both go back to what you were doing. Nobody agreed a duration in advance because nobody had to.
A calendar invite has to have a length, and you have to choose it before the conversation, when you know least about it, from a dropdown whose default is 30 minutes. So a 90-second question becomes a half-hour meeting, and then it fills the half hour, because meetings always do, because there are two people in a room and leaving after four minutes feels rude.
A desk conversation was exactly as long as it needed to be. A meeting is as long as the dropdown said, chosen before anybody knew what it was about.
Multiply that across an agency and you get my 19 hours, and not one person along the way did anything unreasonable.
What we lost that wasn’t the meeting
The other half is the stuff that never had a slot at all.
Ambient information, mostly. In an office I knew which projects were going badly without anyone telling me, because I could hear it. A tone of voice on a phone call two desks away, a particular kind of silence, somebody going to make a third coffee. That’s not gossip, it’s the situational awareness that let me offer help before anybody had to ask for it, which is much easier than being asked.
The informal repair, too. If you’ve had a slightly sharp exchange with a colleague, in an office you bump into them by the kettle within the hour and say something about the weather and it’s over. Now you have a sharp exchange in a thread and then you both go quiet for two days, and the next time you speak it’s a scheduled call about a deliverable. Small frictions used to dissolve on their own. Now they set.
And the thing where somebody wanders past your screen, sees what you’re doing, and says “oh, we’ve already got one of those.” I’ve lost about two days this year to work that existed and that nobody happened to walk past.
What got better, and it’s real
I’ve written a version of this before about chat, and the shape’s the same: the thing that was worse for the people who were already worst served has improved a lot, and it’d be dishonest to skip it.
Everybody’s face is the same size now. In a meeting room, the person at the head of the table with the good voice ran the meeting, and the people on the speakerphone in the middle were furniture. Our remote colleagues were second-class for years and a grid of equal rectangles has done more about that than any amount of good intentions.
The chat panel has turned out to be a genuinely good invention. People who’d never interrupt a meeting will type, and some of the best contributions I’ve seen this year have come from someone quiet putting one sentence in a sidebar. In a room those thoughts went home unsaid.
And there’s a record. Half the meetings I’m in now produce a written summary, because writing one is easier when everyone’s already typing, and a decision with a paper trail is worth a lot more than a decision six people remember differently.
Why it’s tiring in a way an office wasn’t
I sat in open-plan offices for five years surrounded by talking humans and came home less tired than I do now, which seems like it ought to be a paradox.
Some of it is the turn-taking. There’s a fraction of a second of latency, which is nothing, and it’s precisely enough to break the mechanism by which humans hand conversation back and forth. So you either talk over somebody or you leave a gap, and both of those cost a small amount of attention, and you do it 400 times a day.
Some of it is that everybody’s face is at the distance and size that, in person, means either intimacy or confrontation. Eight hours of faces at 18 inches is not a thing our species has done before.
And some of it is watching yourself. There’s a little rectangle of your own face in the corner all day, and I have never in my life had a mirror at my desk, and I don’t think it’s doing me any good.
What I’ve changed
Very little, and all of it small.
25 minutes instead of 30, and 50 instead of 60. It sounds like a gimmick and it’s the single highest-value thing I’ve done, because it means there is a gap between calls in which a person can stand up.
Not accepting anything without an agenda, which I do politely and which has been fine every time. Half of them turn into a message thread instead, which is the correct outcome.
Writing first. If I can put the thing in a document and ask two people to comment, the meeting either becomes unnecessary or becomes 15 focused minutes. This is the one I believe in most and the one I’m worst at, because writing it down takes 40 minutes of my time and calling a meeting takes eight seconds of it, and the cost of the meeting is paid by other people. Which is the same asymmetry I was complaining about with chat messages in 2017, and apparently I’ve learned nothing.
And a rule about the last hour of the day, which is that it doesn’t have meetings in it. Held about 60% of the time. Better than nothing.
Anyway, none of this is really about software. The tools are fine, and some of them are remarkable, and I’d have found this year considerably worse without them.
What I actually miss is standing next to somebody looking at the same screen and being unimpressed together. I don’t think there’s a feature for that, and I’ve stopped waiting for one 😞