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The scarcest resource is real, engaged synchronous meeting time, whether irl, video or audio. When you want people to actually pay attention, voluntarily set aside side-channel activity options, and do the pre-read because they are actually eager to be prepared and participating.
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A minute of such time is worth as much as the individual sum of all participants’ time value. If you and I are worth $5/minute, if we do a genuine meeting, that minute is worth $20, not $10. Meeting-coin is how real wealth is mined.
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Unfortunately it’s a currency that’s abused and debased in traditional orgs. Meeting printer go brr. People hate meetings because they’re expected to show up for meetings with no incentives to make the meetings real. Negative-sum expected value. $2 instead of $20 gdp/minute.
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Getting real meetings to work is so hard, even purely social ones meant to deliver nothing more than the pleasure of company and hanging out — meetups, dates, parties — are hard to sustain after the first curiosity-satisfying instance. Most will die by instance 3.
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In comfy orgs full of bullshit work though, futile meeting tracks run by coercion chug on as zombie meetings for months or sometimes years after everybody has kinda died inside when in the meetings. The currency mined is worth negative dollars.
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A meeting track need not pay off every time, anymore than every hash mined in a blockchain has to win a block reward. But the expect reward over a reasonable horizon has to be positive. The longer people have known/trusted each other, the longer they can go hungry between “wins”
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Replying to
Even a discord audio chat, the closest thing I’ve found to a water cooler chat is at least 3x the cost of its irl counterpart. Because even text-saying to another person who’s present in the discord, “wanna hop on a chat?” is costlier than simply starting to chat at a watercooler
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Even for extroverts it’s easier to stay asynchronous and accept lower rewards than to think harder and engineer the higher rewards to offset higher cost of an audio chat. By contrast, irl, cost of initiating chat is negative because *not* saying hello at water cooler is rude.
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I hope one thing that comes out of this is that we all get better at mining meeting-coin. Even as we debase real currencies around the world to pay ourselves for sitting on our asses while Butters and Kenny do the real work, perhaps meeting-coin will gain in value to compensate.
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Replying to
I've found that an audio+whiteboard Webex call is far less stressful than being on video (whether it's zoom, webex, etc.) But even Zoom at home is far less trouble than in-person (especially since in-person usually means "fly to Chicago" for my organization.)