Notes for Virtual meetings, burnout, and tips for staying sustainable

• Title: Virtual meetings, burnout, and tips for staying sustainable
• Facilitator: Roger
• Who: anybody
• Duration: 1 hour
• Description: Self-help round-table to discuss what challenges we've experienced as the world, and Tor, has moved to having more and more virtual meetings. We will aim to understand how others here are approaching these topics. Our facilitators will keep us at the right balance between complaining vs discovering actionable items to improve our situations. :)

Introduction

The pandemic affected everyone differently. This session is about relating our pain points, the causes of burn-out, and what coping mechanisms we used (or not) to avoid it. Expected outcomes include learning what's up with our peers and what works and what doesn't.

We went around the table to let people explain their situation one by one. We followed the Chatham house rules so there are no attributions here, and hopefully there should be no clear way of identifying participants. Each participant's comments were actually merged into a list of "stories", "pain points", and so on.

Stories

• there is a before and after April 20202, when COVID hit Europe
• then many people were fired, which lead to a lot of demotivation and stress
• many teams disintegrated
• we became good at making quick decisions and got shit done: GitLab, Big Blue Button all happened quickly when they had been blocked for ages before
• workload changed: okay with 2 projects, now we have 5 projects with the same staff, so overload
• feeling happy, privileged: working on specific tasks, no big responsibility, part time
• feeling pressure, not burnout, infinite number of things to do
• lockdown was different for everyone, but affected all of us

Causes and pain points

• too many meetings ("infinite meetings")
• meetings are annoying
• context switching (e.g. one meeting a day is worse than all meetings, back to back, on the same day, but also too many different projects)
• batch jobs ("start this process, wait a bit, see result"), many in parallel means lots of interrupts
• dumping ideas means more work for the future
• prior medical conditions worsening stress, less sleep, and worsening medical condition in a feedback loop
• people too busy to actually have longer meetings to address core issues
• bizarre not to see coworkers
• IRC is too cold to relate, we need face-to-face meetings, cameras are not enough either
• isolation, rarely seeing people in person at all
• working with pseudonyms means we don't really know who we work with
• hard to communicate problems when everyone is overloaded, you just end up giving more work to overloaded people
• difficult to access nature in the city
• being the only person responsible

Coping mechanisms

• declare (meeting) bankruptcy: can't attend any meetings unless explicitly requested

  pros:

  • worked! less stress, more free time
  • happier

  cons:

  • following less things, less in the loop
  • harder to do the job of acting as the glue between people

• good meeting etiquette:

  • report minutes / decisions after meetings (although not necessary for standups or 1:1 naturally)

• psychology / therapy / community thing?

• open big blue button room where people have meetings, hang out, have a beer on friday, tell pirate stories

• team lead having 1:1s all on the same day, every two weeks

• back-to-back meetings all on one day instead of one meeting per day means less interruption

• start meetings with topics that require input from other teams so they can leave after the topic

• having people in the same team closer together, timezone-wise, makes it easier to schedule meetings

• have a signal chat

• make the chat chattier: if something funny happens during the day, tell your coworkers on the chat, or send a song per week, make sure there is something in the chat every day, say "hi!"

• new staff absorbing overload of work, optimizing things that we didn't have time to fix before

• enjoying the outdoors, natures, pigeons

• moving to the countryside

• having an office (now closed)

• weekly checkins, over BBB (voice or video), private meeting, keeping a dual IRC meeting for public involvement, not sure if it's worth having both

• "radical async organisation":

  • meetings are a waste of time
  • empathy with people in "weird" timezones
  • find "water coolers" (BBB being the best water cooler we have right now)

• have a dog: they force you to get out at least once a day

• cats are nice

• setting boundaries, saying no

• hackweeks, maybe help?

• accept failure, relax: it's okay that this doesn't get done

• for multi-tasking batch jobs, see the do nothing script approach

What does not work

• giving people more free time: people love their work and just end up working on their free time

Remaining questions

• how do we deal with one person having 10 meetings? do we ask those 9 other people to adjust, or do we sacrifice that one person?
• what is fair to ask of people?