Microsoft Outlook Now Lets You End All Meetings Early To Give Your Brain a Rest (cnbc.com) 34
Microsoft is updating Outlook to give companies the option to automatically start or end all meetings early to ensure employees have a break between back-to-backs. New settings in Outlook are rolling out to help reduce the digital overload of working remotely. From a report: Companies can set their own scheduling defaults, and they're fully customizable. That means you could have five minutes blocked off before or after a 30-minute meeting, or 10-15 minutes after hourlong meetings. Individuals can also set their own scheduling defaults, but the company-wide option is the significant change here. The inclusion of the new change comes after Microsoft's own research confirmed that back-to-back virtual meetings are stressful. CNBC adds: For the research, 14 individuals took part in video meetings while wearing electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment to measure brain activity, one day attending stretches of four half-hour meetings back-to-back, while on another day four half-hour meetings interspersed with 10-minute breaks. Lack of breaks resulted in spikes in the beta waves associated with stress building up near the transition periods between meetings, while breaks allowed brains to reset and better engage. Pictures of what the human brain actually looks like "on meeting" are in the full report.
Welcome to a Google feature from 8 years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Google's calendar has had this for 8 years. Suddenly, on the new Slashdot, it's news when Microsoft does it. I guess the only benefit is that maybe there's a chance someone else will copy this and we'll still have the feature when Google finally decides to cancel their calendar because they got bored of it.
Re:Welcome to a Google feature from 8 years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool, and now the civilized world can enjoy this "feature" too.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
technology substituting good business practices (Score:4, Insightful)
This shouldn't even need to happen. Meetings are a plague. They are historically unproductive, not cost-efficient, and involve way too many people. Instead of not being plastered with listening to morons bark at the moon on Zoom all day, perhaps we can run a company correctly? Nah.
Microsoft is going to give us a 5 minutes to get to the next class. Maybe I can get in line to take a piss like in high school.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
In a long career with lots of meetings, I can count on one hand the number of people who could run a good meeting, keeping it focused and ending it on time.
I'm sorry to hear about the accident that cost you most of your fingers on that hand.
As for me, I could count on one finger the number of people who could run a good meeting, keeping it focused and ending it on time.
Re: (Score:3)
In a long career with lots of meetings, I can count on one hand the number of people who could run a good meeting, keeping it focused and ending it on time.
In "management" trainings, we were taught to start a meeting with small talk to get people "warmed up" and "open up" so you would get more productive meetings.
I say bullsh*t and start meetings with the topics in the agenda and finish it when done. Not wasting time is being productive.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad I don't have any meetings with you.
Rather than increasing productivity, you are instead showing your reports that their only value to you is as a resource to be moved around from Task A to Task B. In the long run, this will make them less happy at their jobs and hurt productivity far more than starting meetings with a few minutes of small talk.
When people are isolated at home for a year it's essential for their mental health (and yours) to treat them like human beings and not just automatons.
Re: (Score:2)
And you are one of the reason why GP and many people thought meetings are a plague.
Go talk to your friends if you are starved for social interaction. Most of your coworkers are already overworked and have no wish to waste time in meetings for your benefit at the expense of their valuable time.
Re: (Score:1)
Says the introvert and you know what, I fully agree with you. Best way to treat meetings make appointments with customers at that time and customers always come first. They are most useless and every gets offended when you come up with the solutions for the problems to be dealt with in a hour long meeting in the first few minutes. They ignore this and they WANT to go on talking about it, the meeting is for extroverts to express themselves and not about productivity or solutions. You know what though, that i
Re: (Score:1)
PS when come back from a meeting exhausted and take a fair while to get back into work, thinking meetings suck dead dogs balls and they come back from meetings refreshed and raring to go thinking how great meetings are.
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting, but not new (Score:3)
The summary makes it look like Microsoft is just adding or just about to add the feature. It was released in 19.08 (August 2019) - maybe earlier if you’re not on long term support versions.
And of course Lotus Notes had the feature for a long time before, along with quite a lot of other calendaring apps.
In my opinion, back to back virtual meetings are far less stressful than back to back physical meetings. Having meetings end with enough time to clear out of the room, be able to be polite to the next room users, and to get to the next meeting on time is very valuable. I’m not sure a calendaring feature is really needed to do this, but it does set expectations early.
I can do that already ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft Outlook Now Lets You End All Meetings Early
Just press the little "X" in the upper right-hand corner of the window ...
Really? We need software for this? (Score:2)
And yeah, I did piss of some, um, a lot of peeps walking out of their meetings 10 minutes in.
Re: (Score:3)
I actually appreciate the people who invite me to meetings I don't need to be involved in. I won't go anyway, and it blocks the spot for the next guy who tries to do the same. Then people who absolutely, truly need me to attend IM me or send me an email asking me when I can be available, and after understanding if they actually do need me, by pure miracle I have an open slot available exactly when it is good for them.
I imagine this is how things worked before electronic calendars were invented, it seemed li
And typical for Microsoft .... (Score:2)
This functionality seems to be somewhat broken, too.
We tried to implement this "auto shorten meetings" feature in Outlook by pushing out the appropriate registry changes via InTune, and found that it worked on some computers, but not on others.
My laptop was one where Outlook would never enable the check-box for this feature, despite getting the registry changes. (It looks like all the other settings related to it applied properly -- but just not the most important one that turns it all on.)
I just manually
But (Score:2)
Does your boss allow it?
Awesome, seems people had no way of ending early (Score:2)
What? What? What? This is awesome news, apparently people had absolutely no way of ending the meeting early without an explicit button to do so.
Just walking out of the room, or simply saying goodbye was apparently not an option for them. As a result, some people insisted to ramble for hours for no reason.
Hopefully some people get a hint that some meetings do not have to go on for a full hour :p
This Rocks, Productivity is going to go through the roof and morale is just gonna skyrocket all the way to the moo
Re: (Score:2)
I was hoping there'd at least be some electroshock. In my experience someone's phone telling them the meeting was over rarely has more effect than prompting them to say "we seem to be going long..." and then keep talking.
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
"back-to-back virtual meetings are stressful."
Nobody will notice if you wet or shit your sweatpants.
Re: (Score:3)
Nobody will notice if you wet or shit your sweatpants.
Lol, as if I wear pants to meetings.
Sure, this is what we need (Score:3)
Who cares that in Teams you can't choose where to download a file, let alone rename it before saving it to a specific location. Or that in CRM you can't rename an extract on the fly but have to save it first. Not to mention that similar to Teams, you don't get to choose where to save an extract even if the option is set.
But sure, having to force an early end to a meeting rather than the meeting organizer doing it seems so much more needful than fixing broken products.
Well damn (Score:3)
Microsoft has done more to promote the proliferation of meetings we deal with than any other entity on earth. Like an arsonist who also sells fire extinguishers on the side.
How nice of them to let us leave early. But then they negate it by asking us to start early?
It's just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Thanks, Microsoft, but I don't need your permission to leave a meeting early. I have a long list of excuses, errr, I mean "reasons" that I can use whenever I like.
meetings all day with 15 min of real work an week (Score:1)
meetings all day with 15 min of real work an week bob that is what I do in by job hear.
That doesn't sound right (Score:2)
"start or end all meetings early to ensure employees have a break between back-to-backs."
If you want to ensure employees have a break between back-to-back meetings, don't you have to start meetings *late*, not early?
New feature? (Score:3)
I'm puzzled. I've had this configured in Outlook for literally years. All Outlook meeting invites I send automatically default to ending 5 minutes before the nearest half hour.
But I normally end a meeting once we've resolved the issue or reached an agreement regardless of what time it is. Just this week I scheduled a meeting for the default duration of 25 minutes and ended it after 13 minutes because we that's all we needed. And another meeting I have scheduled for 25 minutes sometimes runs over 90 minutes if we're still figuring things out or solving problems.
Re: (Score:2)
How is that a "feature"?? (Score:2)
Any decent computer software must have the capabilities to set such things via trivial automation. Including creating it as a button or whatever. Like... a 5 minute thing to set up and never need touching by anyone in the organization again.
This is what you get for turning computers into appliances.