Turns out home working, an exciting form of freedom for some just a few months ago, palls after a while. Who knew?
It’s been fun, and continues to be fun, but some of the more subtle advantages of working in the office were missing. For example, video meetings that last more than about an hour are much harder than similar face to face meetings.
I’m a big lover of big whiteboards. When we set up our office, we bought the biggest one we could find, and it’s been a boon. Online meetings – no matter what tools you have – can’t take the place of a meeting room and a big whiteboard.
So a couple of weeks ago, for only the second time since It Began in March, I was in the office. Our Operations Manager, Jonathan, and I wanted to do some planning. The type of planning that needs the big whiteboard.
So yes, there were face masks and hand sanitiser and a process of minimising the risk of infection, but we had a successful meeting. This is likely to be the way forwards for a while (a year? Two?).
We’re also looking at the best way of managing the Strategy Sessions we run, where we look at the challenges offered by either migrating to the cloud or optimizing existing Linux systems. I’m not a big fan of webinars as I find the pace of most presenters is too slow (and the webinars are too long).
But maybe running webinars is the way forwards, for now at least. What do you think? Would a 40 minute webinar on “Cloud migration: how to do it successfully” be useful? Or is there another way you’d prefer to receive that kind of information?