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Archive for January, 2021

Too Many Meetings

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It’s mid-January. I had great New Year’s resolutions. I have already downgraded to “blog more”. Brian Romans started what he calls “friday links” on twitter. Let’s say that I aim for something similar, but here on my blog. Which I have been neglecting. Starting to write again on a blog that has been neglected, is in style.

The thing that has been bothering me substantially before Christmas: too many meetings. To some extent, the “too many meetings” problem has been going on before Corona. At the early times of Corona (Spring 2020), there might have been actually less meetings. Currently, the situation seems as bad as it has ever been. One Webex or Zoom, meeting after meeting. It’s difficult to find time to get anything done. This has become very clear over the Christmas holidays.

This article (via Rui Carmo) gets many things right. This I found particularly interesting:

It’s even worse when a worker has several meetings that are separated by 30 minutes. “Not enough time to transition in a non-MRS situation to get anything done, and in an MRS situation, not quite enough time to recover for the next meeting,”

One remedy sounds simple but I am not sure how to achieve this: less meetings

Less time in meetings would ultimately lead to more employee engagement in the meetings they do attend, which experts agree is a proven remedy for future cases of MRS.

So, “just” saying “no” more often!(?) Maybe more tools and automation? Maybe this high – profile advice will help me to decide if I should accept a meeting. Also important: he emphasises that everybody should be prepared, everybody should speak. Breaks sometimes are no real breaks but are giving your brain time to digest thoughts. Even more, breaks are always necessary. And: everything is uncertain!

It is one thing to realise that everything is uncertain, but as @dougmcneall points out:

Making constant risk decisions is exhausting.

This brings us to Corona. During which the usual exhausted-ness seems to be amplified, e.g., with sub-optimal working conditions, and with kids at home. Like Hayley Fowler points out: I’m just tired of everything. Like Brent Simmons point outs:

“I’ve been haunted since hearing, in the early days of the pandemic, that if we all wore masks for six weeks this thing would be over. I was there. I’ve done that for six weeks, and another six weeks, and another. And now it’s worse than ever. It’s a challenge not to be angry. There are healthy, uninfected people right now, today, who are excited for the vaccine and who will die before they get it.

Teaching Experiences

  • webex (which we use at the University of Stuttgart), has now the ability to share the iPad’s screen! It might have been there before, but I realised it existed only on Monday. Before, I knew that zoom can do it. Anyways, this has proven to be a nice tool for teaching sequentially and more spontaneously than an animated slideshow.

  • I’ve upgraded to JupyterLab 3 with it’s visual debugger. Very nice, also for teaching! This ranked list of awesome Jupyter Notebook, Hub and Lab projects (extensions, kernels, tools), that is updated weekly, provides also very many useful hints!

Ending

With Input from

Written by Claus

January 18th, 2021 at 5:03 pm

Posted in Uncategorized