Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Over at the excellent Thinking Faster blog, there is a post on Meetings which I found interesting. I often ponder about how work days at Microsoft are fairly broken. Between email and meetings it’s amazing that I can actually do any work. If I go to meetings, I get behind on mail. If I am not behind on mail I am behind on work or late for a meeting. Invariably everyone in the meeting is doing mail so that they don’t get behind on mail.
We’ve tried some things at work like meeting free Tues/Wed for the development team, but I don’t think it works very well.
“I find myself saying this more and more, as my calendar becomes more and more crowded with events, meetings and conversations put there by other people. Don't get me wrong, there are good reasons for meetings, but I feel like my work life is becoming secondary to my meeting life. Getting a meeting request used to be a sign that you were somebody. Someone wanted your opinion on a matter of great urgency for the firm. Now it seems that the email CC: phenomena has migrated from email to meetings: the basic rule of thumb - invite everyone to every meeting. It's a wonder anything gets done during "normal" working hours.” Thinking Faster: Do we really need to meet?
“I find myself saying this more and more, as my calendar becomes more and more crowded with events, meetings and conversations put there by other people. Don't get me wrong, there are good reasons for meetings, but I feel like my work life is becoming secondary to my meeting life.
Getting a meeting request used to be a sign that you were somebody. Someone wanted your opinion on a matter of great urgency for the firm. Now it seems that the email CC: phenomena has migrated from email to meetings: the basic rule of thumb - invite everyone to every meeting. It's a wonder anything gets done during "normal" working hours.”
Thinking Faster: Do we really need to meet?