The default is 30 minutes
A conversation at a desk is exactly as long as it needs to be, and a calendar invite has to guess before anybody knows anything.
Last week I put half an hour in a coworker’s calendar to ask whether a field on a form was required. It was.
That left about 25 minutes. We spent them, because two adults do not get on a video call, settle a thing in 90 seconds and then say goodbye. So we talked about the rest of the project, and then about the client, and then a bit about nothing. It was pleasant and I have no idea what it was for lol
Then I added up the rest of the week, which I don’t recommend doing. 19 hours of calls out of a week that is nominally 40. Maybe 11 of those hours were things that in February would have happened by me turning around in my chair.
In April, from a kitchen table that was also where I ate dinner, I’d have told you the 10-second questions had stopped happening and people were guessing instead. That was half right. Some of them stopped. The rest got a start time.
How long is a conversation?
A conversation at a desk is exactly as long as it needs to be, which is such an ordinary property of a conversation that I never once noticed it until it was gone. Nobody agrees a duration in advance because nobody has to. It ends when the answer arrives, or when one of you loses interest, and both of those endings are socially fine.
A calendar invite can’t do that. It has to declare its length before it happens, which is the precise moment when the person choosing knows the least about it, and the choosing gets done from a little menu whose first option is 30 minutes.
So a 90-second question becomes a half-hour meeting. And then it becomes half an hour of talking, because work expands to fill the time available for it and because getting off a call after two minutes feels like leaving somebody’s house before the coffee. Multiply that across an agency and you get my 19 hours. Not one person along the way did anything unreasonable. There’s no villain in it anywhere, just a menu with a default on it and a lot of people being polite.
The part where I argue with myself
Now the half I’d defend, which is bigger than the complaining half and gets said a lot less often.
Everybody’s face is the same size. A meeting room had a head of the table and a plastic puck in the middle of it, and whoever was dialing in came out of that puck at half volume with a delay on them, and the room had forgotten they were there by the second item on the agenda. I watched that happen to the same two people for years and never said anything about it. A grid of equal rectangles fixed it in six months, and being nice about it hadn’t fixed it in a decade. I made pretty much this exact concession about chat channels in 2017, which is either consistency or a sign that I only ever notice who a tool lets in after the tool has already won.
The chat panel is the other big one. People who would never interrupt a room will type, and a fair number of the best things anybody has said to me this year showed up as one line in a side panel while somebody more senior was talking. In a room those sentences went home in somebody’s head.
And there’s a record now. About half the calls I’m on produce a written summary afterward, mostly because writing one is easy when everybody’s hands are already on a keyboard, and a decision with something written down under it is worth a great deal more than a decision everybody remembers differently.
8 hours of faces at 18 inches
I sat in open-plan offices until March, surrounded by people talking all day, and went home less tired than I do now. That ought to be a paradox and it isn’t.
Some of it is the turn-taking. There’s a lag on every call, small enough that nobody bothers complaining about it. It happens to be exactly enough to break the mechanism people use to hand a conversation back and forth. So you talk over somebody, or you leave a gap and they talk over you, and either way there’s a tiny apology, and you do that dozens of times a day.
Some of it is that every face on the screen sits at the size and the distance that, in a room, would mean either intimacy or a fight. Our species has not previously spent 8 hours a day at 18 inches from a row of coworkers’ heads.
And some of it is watching myself. There’s a small rectangle of my own face in the corner of the screen for the entire working day. I have never in my life had a mirror at my desk, I didn’t ask for one, and I don’t think it’s doing me any good.
Five minutes off the top
Four things I do to my own calendar.
25 minutes instead of 30, and 50 instead of 60. It reads like something off a productivity blog and it’s the best thing I’ve done all year, because it puts a gap between two calls in which a human being can stand up and go to the bathroom.
Declining anything that arrives with no agenda on it, which I do politely, and which has yet to cause a problem. About half of them turn into a message thread instead, which is what should have happened to them in the first place.
Writing first. If I can put the thing in a document and ask two people to comment on it, the call either stops being necessary or turns into 15 focused minutes. This is the one I believe in hardest and do worst, because writing it down costs me 40 minutes and booking a call costs me 8 seconds, and the 40 minutes I save get paid for out of everybody else’s afternoon. Which is precisely the complaint I made about chat messages in 2017. I closed that post by admitting I was the problem there too, so at this point it’s less a blind spot than a hobby.
And a rule about the last hour of the day, which is that no calls go in it. I hold it maybe 60% of the time, which is worse than a rule and considerably better than nothing.
Anyway, none of this is really a complaint about the software. The tools are fine, one or two of them are genuinely remarkable. I’d have had a substantially worse year without them. What I miss isn’t a feature somebody forgot to build. It’s standing next to a person, both of us looking at the same screen, being unimpressed by the same thing at the same time, for however long that takes and then not a second longer. Nobody has to pick that off a menu before it starts, which is most of the reason it works, and six months in I’ve stopped expecting to get it back this year 😔